


Unkindness

by black_and_gold



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Dom/sub, Explicit Sexual Content, Kylux Big Bang 2020, M/M, Mild Blood, Mixed Martial Arts, Oral Sex, References to Drugs, References to Organized Crime
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-29
Updated: 2020-12-29
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:21:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 31,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28376880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/black_and_gold/pseuds/black_and_gold
Summary: 'The first time you heard the name Kylo Ren was actually the third time you had heard the name Kylo Ren.  Kylo Ren, as in: Mitaka rapping on the doorframe to your office on a quiet Wednesday afternoon, poking his nervous little face inside, and saying, “I have a Mr. Kylo Ren to see you, Sir.” Kylo Ren, as in: you, without looking up from a stack of appraisal reports from the new jeweler you started consulting once the old one went to jail for money laundering, asking, “Who the fuck is Kylo Ren?”"Hux, a Las Vegas bookie, lives a life without many surprises. That is until he meets up-and-coming MMA fighter, Kylo Ren.
Relationships: Armitage Hux/Kylo Ren
Comments: 4
Kudos: 24
Collections: Kylux Big Bang 2020





	1. Part 1

**Author's Note:**

> I want to thank [Pangolin Pirate](https://pangolinpirate.tumblr.com/) for the amazing art and all your patience!

The first time you heard the name Kylo Ren was actually the third time you had heard the name Kylo Ren. Kylo Ren, as in: Mitaka rapping on the doorframe to your office on a quiet Wednesday afternoon, poking his nervous little face inside, and saying, “I have a Mr. Kylo Ren to see you, Sir.” Kylo Ren, as in: you, without looking up from a stack of appraisal reports from the new jeweler you started consulting once the old one went to jail for money laundering, asking, “Who the fuck is Kylo Ren?”

You don’t expect visitors during the afternoon, especially not Wednesdays. The few issues that arise in First Order Booking during the afternoon can generally be handled by the administrative staff or at the very worst, Mitaka. Verifying a placed bet or the odds on a fight or a football game or a horse race---you, as the captain of this ship, are above this. Even placing bets can be handled by someone else. Since most bets come in after 5pm on Friday, just in time for a weekend of games and fights, Wednesday afternoons are quiet times around the small office tucked on the third floor of a nondescript building not too far off the strip. Your Wednesday afternoons are normally spent finalizing and approving payouts on Sunday’s bets, a solitary endeavor that you generally look forward to. (Except for this week, because even though you know next to nothing about professional jewelry appraisal and resale, you have a sneaking suspicion that the representative from Morrison Jewelers, Kaylee or Callie or something, is probably low balling you. You know that plenty of people—honest businessmen and good citizens--turn their noses at the idea of taking personal property as collateral for bets but all of them will take a Toyota Corolla with six thousand miles when you come by looking to offload it.)

You aren’t expecting anyone. Hence: Who the fuck is Kylo Ren?

“Me.” Whoever-the-fuck-Kylo-Ren-is pushes the door out of Mitaka’s grip and steps into your office. He’s tall, taller than you maybe, but definitely broader beneath his faded red t-shirt. He waggles an envelope between his fingers. It has _Armitage_ written in familiar looping script. “Snoke told me to give these to you.”

And, normally, you would have pressed the security button underneath your desk the moment Mitaka’s fingertips left the door, but the mention of Snoke stops you. Mr. Olivier Snoke is a client you inherited from your father, despite the fact your industries and specialties are worlds apart. But when Mr. Olivier Snoke—or someone sent in his stead—comes knocking, you know well enough to answer the door. That generally leaves you placing bets in banded stacks of hundreds sent by his trusty courier, Antonio; calling vets in the middle of the night asking if they specialize in avian medicine by any chance; and checking which airports within 500 miles take private _and_ paramilitary planes. It leaves you with, _Calvada Meadows Airport in Pahrump is quite amenable, Sir_ ; _Tropical or domestic, Sir, because Dr. Lanier has a wonderful wildlife rehab reputation_ ; And of course, _Sir, I’ll leave the slips are with Antonio. Thank you for your patronage_. 

But this isn’t Antonio, a punctual man who wears immaculate button-down shirts, never wrinkled or sweat stained despite the endless heat in this constant desert, who has a gruesome set of scars running from the heel of each hand to the slot between middle and ring fingers. This is someone else, towering a clear head over Mitaka, head haloed in unruly black hair. His nose is hawkish and he has the sickly yellow ghost of a bruise toward the hinge of his jaw. He seems oblivious to the worried looks that Mitaka shoots between the two of you, instead he peers around your office.

Even though you’ve been in this building, in this office for nearly six years, you keep it bare. The one picture on the wall is of a set of mountains that bridge the border between Mynamar and Laos, the deep and jagged greens against a brilliant blue sky. Otherwise, the walls are white, punctuated by three file cabinets on opposite walls.

You wave Mitaka away and his pinched face disappears behind the doorframe. You know well enough that he’s hovering but he’s far enough away to let this Kylo Ren close the door unimpeded. This Kylo Ren strides toward your desk and slaps the envelope over your jewelry appraisals.

You can almost hear Snoke’s off-kilter lilt of your name when you see his handwriting. _Armitage_. Always Armitage. He never says Hux, the name you insist upon in your introductions, as in: _Armitage Hux, but please, call me Hux_. You imagine it’s because, to Snoke, your father was Hux and you will always be Hux’s boy, Armitage. You imagine, to Snoke, you are always twenty-two, freshly orphaned, and needing ten thousand dollars to stay afloat. You imagine you are always: _Of course, Armitage, anything for the son of such an esteemed colleague._

You’ve long since paid him back, many times over, but Snoke has a way of making it seem like you are the only person he knows in all of Nevada. In all of the Western Hemisphere. He asks you for things you are under no obligation to provide, so effortlessly. Twenty-four-hour tailors and specialty irrigation equipment at wholesale prices and… oh yes—how could you forget—a favor, about his new protegee, a Master Kylo Ren.

So, the first time you heard the name Kylo Ren was actually the second time you heard the name Kylo Ren. Kylo Ren, as in: Mr. Snoke’s raspy voice over the phone saying, “I would like you to watch out for my newest protégée, a Master Kylo Ren.”

Kylo Ren, as in: you, “Excuse me, Sir, did you say… Kylo Ren?”

He had called to thank you for putting him in contact with a gravel distributor. As soon as he had said thank you, he had slid into another request. For a moment you couldn’t tell if he said something more sensible, or at least meant to, and it came out as ‘Kylo Ren’. Snoke has a strange accent after all. It sounds like it’s been stitched together from scraps of other voices. His ‘A’s are stretched and canted in a distinctly British way. But he pronounces whisky with a German intonation— _viskee_. His ‘R’s trill in a way that’s vaguely Eastern European. He can pronounce the capital of Honduras flawlessly—Tegucigalpa—but he has trouble with the ‘wh’ sound. Whole comes out sounding like _woal_.

He always speaks English despite sounding decidedly uncomfortable with it. Once, when you were seventeen and hanging around an ex-military airfield somewhere near the border of Myanmar and Thailand, you had run into Snoke in a tent masquerading as a lounge of some kind. It was populated with a couple of folding chairs and a cooler with American sodas you could only identify by color scheme. When Snoke saw you peeling the label off of what was most likely a Fresca, he said, “Hux’s boy, no? Armitage.” You nodded, nails working into the tacky glue against the bottle. You had only heard about him in snippets at this point: Snoke, a man who burnt a hacienda to the ground with everyone inside because of a two-kilogram accounting discrepancy; Snoke, the owner of a fleet of two dozen helicopters all kept in an airconditioned hanger in the California desert; Snoke, a man edging on fifty, sixty, eighty, a hundred and twenty years old; the burns on arms are from Austria in 1890 or Juarez 1980; Snoke, more myth than man.

Snoke frowned and perched at the edge a folding chair. He had young hands but a papery neck. You couldn’t tell how old he was either. He said, “I wouldn’t have come here but this whole operation is very…elbow.” Then he paused, rubbed the pads of his fingers together and frowned. At that moment— seventeen and worried over vague signage on _Protecting Yourself From Japanese Encephalitis_ —it’d be hard to imagine that somehow, a decade and change later your father would be dead and you’d have Snoke’s number saved in your phone under _Olivier S._

Still, you’ve never asked where Snoke’s from. You don’t want to know honestly. The less you know about Snoke the better. You try to keep it to this, another request on top of the ones for plastic wrap wholesalers and where to rent diggers long term.

You say _Yes_ because that is the right answer. _No_ only digs you farther into the sandpit that swallowed your father whole. So, Kylo Ren as in: _I’ll keep an eye on your Mr. Kylo Ren._

So, the first time you heard the name Kylo Ren, the actual first time was this: “And the winner by referee stoppage is Kylo Ren.”

Kylo Ren, as in: _note---make file on Kylo Ren_ , written on a sticky note and promptly forgotten. 

You had asked Mitaka to collect video of a fighter, Gislin Johannes. A small-time guy booked in a series of undercards for the fall. Googling only produced an Instagram full protein powder and oiled biceps. Based on GJohannesRSato.mp4,l JAlverezGJohannes.mp4, and another dozen similarly names files from dmitaka@fobooking.com; Gislin was a boxing specialist, a decent advantage over standard grapplers with no stand up offense. When they’d try to close in for a takedown he’d strike with a quick combination to the jaw. His late game stamina left something to be desired but that’s not uncommon among young fighters. At the beginning of each round, he’d tap his gloves together and point toward the camera, smile breezily like he hadn’t gotten kicked in kidneys for minutes on end. His smile was cocky, like he was hoping he’d be advertising Omega watches in the future; the kind of smile people will love to see punched off of him.

The fifteenth video that Mitaka gave him was 1 minute and 34 seconds long. GJohannesKRen.mp4. You thought it was an error at first, that it’d cut out just as the first round was getting started. But no, after the introductions and the ring of the opening bell, Gislin stalked in toward—who was it, Kylo Ren?—with his hands up in defensive position. Gislin opens his body for the left jab/right hook combo he opens about 80% of his fights with. Kylo Ren or whoever tucks his neck, drops his guard, and takes the left jab on the chin. And you swear you can see a sliver of a smile spread across Kylo Ren’s lips before he reaches out and grabs Gislin’s skull. Kylo takes advantage of the moment of surprise that sets in when his large hand fit around the back of Glislin’s neck to haul Gislin around and fit his arm under his chin. Kylo leans back on his heels and grabs his own bicep. A standing rear naked choke. A blood choke, stopping blood to the brain, opposed to a true choke or an air choke which stops air to the lungs. A blood choke, if applied properly can render an opponent unconscious in seconds—so once Kylo hitches his other arm behind Gislin’s head to press him forward, you know it’s over. But Kylo with a gleam in his eyes, hauls his arms tighter around Gislin’s throat and leans back even further. Gislin’s feet scramble as they lose grip on the floor, as his face goes red, as the referee runs in to peel Kylo’s arms away. For a moment there, a hectic moment, Kylo Ren was hanging another man with his own arms; he only lets go once the bell rings.

Kylo Ren, as in: Winner by referee stoppage, Kylo Ren.

The referee holds Kylo’s arm up as they announce his victory, but he pulls it away before they reach the “o” in Kylo Ren.

***

But back to today—a scorching Wednesday afternoon spent cloaked in the air conditioning of your office, you pick up the envelope and wiggle your pinky under its flap. And instead of asking, _why the fuck are you here_ , or _what does Snoke want from me this time_ , you ask, “What happened to Antonio?”

A scowl crosses Kylo’s face. A petulant little thing. “Fuck if I know. I’m not his HR rep.”

Childish, you think. Not worth your time. Or Snoke’s you’d guess. You imagine that his fight skill is what keeps him in anyone’s good graces.

“Simple question,” you say. “No need to be so prickly.” You jimmy open the envelope. Photocopies of betting slips with corrections written in red ink. Normally, you’d take bet changes by phone or email but no, Snoke doesn’t do things like that. He doesn’t deal with your subordinates. He doesn’t talk money or flight schedules over the phone. _“You never know whose listening, Armitage. And there’s nothing incriminating about sunflower seeds now is there?”_ You can’t imagine him stooping so low as to interact with a machine. Hence, Antionio and the hundreds of miles he must drive. Or in this case, Kylo.

“So,” Kylo drawls. He leans in over your desk, casting a long shadow over your forms, over the lacquered expanse of wood, over you. “Snoke told me that you could point me in the direction of fun in this damn hellscape.” He reaches out and flicks at the collar of your black button-down, neatly ironed. Kylo says, “But I’m not sure if an insurance salesman with a stick shoved up his ass can show me a good time.”

You have the ticklish urge to tuck your neck against the ghost of his fingers but if you’ve learned one thing it’s to never show weakness. Not in this business, not ever. You look up at him, at his dark dark eyes, you do not flinch or turn. You imagine that most people falter under his gaze, whether across a ring or across a desk. You imagine he—like you, like Snoke—does not often fail to get what he sets out to acquire.

“I’m sorry, I’m not up to date on the hottest spitball contests.”

You look up at him and you remember the video. Oh yes, how could you forget. The hint of the smile as Gislin’s eyes glazed over, as his legs spasmed. You want to call it a predator’s delight but that’s wrong. Predators don’t enjoy the hunt, the slick of blood, the smell of the kill. They do it out of necessity. To eat. To live. The joy belongs to some different species entirely. Kylo leans back, the light returns.

“That was unfair of me. Undertaker? No. Taxman. Forgive me.” His smile shifts to something teasing, eyes crinkling at the edges. And that sends a shiver down your spine.

You wonder what kind of brutality left the bruise along his corner of his jaw, what fight. You wonder if he smiled at that the same way.

This is not what you expected to do today. This was not a feeling to intended to feel. A quiet and productive day at the office, an uneventful dinner of leftover rotisserie chicken and rice pilaf, an early night. Instead, you can feel your heart rate ticking up, a tingle along the nape of your neck. It tastes like danger, or something deliciously close.

You clear your throat. “Why, might I ask, is this at all my responsibility. This,” you say, tapping the stack of papers neatly arranged on the side of your desk. Appraisal forms, betting slips, scouting reports on every fighter worth a shit in the northern hemisphere. He glances at the rustle of papers and looks unimpressed. ”is my job. Not babysitting an adult with poor manners.”

“Should I tell Snoke that one of his most trusted associates wouldn’t honor such a promise, and such a simple one at that.” He knows he has you beat, his grin spreading like an oil spill. Snoke— with his acres of unspoiled desert property, dozens of carrion birds, and hundreds of subordinates, each more unsqueamish than the last—is a trump card that you have no interest in challenging. While you are reasonably sure that you would not meet any real resistance for refusing such a petty request, you have no interest in learning exactly how Snoke tallies such insubordination. You huff out a breath.

Part of you wants to label that cowardly, to drop names to get what he wants—but you know that in real life, no one gets extra points for advantages they do not leverage. To expect such is worse than cowardly, it’s idiotic.

You press the intercom button and tell Mitaka to hold your calls for the remainder of the afternoon. A crackly _yes, sir_ comes from the intercom as you retrieve your jacket from the hook on the wall.

“You’re gonna come with me? I thought you’d pawn me off on one of your subordinates. Maybe the sweaty one who followed me in here.”You can tell now that you’re standing that he is taller than you, but just barely. An inch at most. When he looks at you his pupils are near even with yours, just visible in the bright sunlight from the window. He says, “I’m sure I’d have fun with him.”

“Mitaka has work to do too.” You hold the door open, motioning him out into the hallway and away from all your neatly arranged things. You flick the lights off and drop your office into darkness. “And I don’t want you sicking your boss on me because your knickers got in a twist.”

“My boss? Isn’t Snoke—”

As you pass through the hallways, people look up from their work. You can feel their eyes follow both of you to the elevator. You aren’t in the habit of leaving work early. You imagine the low level employees think you sleep tucked up under your desk.

“I don’t work for Snoke. This is a favor between associates or what have you.”

Once you’re standing in the parking lot, you realize that you have no clue how he got here. He doesn’t produce a set of car keys from his pocket.

He squints toward the flow of traffic. “So,” he says. “ _Is_ there anything to do in this hellscape?”

Well, there’s gambling. There’s dancing. There’s Cirque de Sole. There’s that zipline that runs along the strip. There’s that big ass ferris wheel. There’s that military aeronautics museum all the way out in the desert. There’s bingo as far as the eyes can see. Penny slot machines are everywhere from car dealerships to laundromats. There are buffets overflowing with seafood trucked through the scorching wasteland of the southwest to be here, on ice, just for retirees and Midwesterners to gorge on. There are fountains shimmering with chlorinated water in a municipality that has had ten water shortages in the past twelve years.

So yeah, there’s tons to do, just none of it that interests you remotely. So, you decide to take Kylo to the Marina Hotel. A bit of nostalgia really, if you’re being honest. The owners are Mormons or ex-Mormons or something. A family with close to a dozen children all with names like Virtue and Jeremiah.

You started going there when you first showed up in Vegas, constantly pink with sunburn and the looming threat of heatstroke. The Marina was quiet and clean. Perpetually half empty, almost haunted by its scant staff and patrons. The girl at the counter, Charity, spoke in a voice that was more air than sound but she still rang out clear in the lobby. The carpet was rich blue like deep ocean. The couches, the chairs, the room keys: each one a richer shade than the last like they kept mining deeper and deeper until they hit the inky black of the ocean floor. Despite the lonely feel inside its blue walls, they had good drinks, reasonably priced. They let you lounge by the pool reserved for guests after a couple visits because “you look honest, like you had to work to survive.” Which wigged you out to be honest, because you had spent the better part of the past decade trying to look just the opposite.

The pool is the real crown jewel, the reason why you’ve been coming here year after year even when nicer, cheaper bars opened up closer to your office. The pool house is cool and dim, echo-y quiet, the ceiling pinpricked with lights. Yes, cheesy. But sometimes, after a long week of being stalked and threatened, scrounging around this endless desert to try to find enough cash to keep the business running, you’d come here and float in the pool—quiet, dark, weightless just like you imagined space would be.

At the end of the night, Bartholomew would wipe down the deck and put away the chairs while you floated. When he was done, he stood by the switch for the ceiling lights. “Mr. Hux,”—ah the formality— “Mr. Hux, it’s closing time.” Then, and only then, would you haul yourself out of the water, into the real world.

A couple of years later, when you were less in debt and more stressed, you did them a favor—an uncommon one surely, especially in your line of work, especially for you. You forgave them of a debt, a sizable one if you’re to be honest, simply for the lifetime privilege to soak in the pool after hours.

And since you don’t like horse racing or show girls and you don’t really want to see another military plane in your life and don’t like hiking and you don’t like clubbing, you bring him here. Charity doesn’t work here anymore and neither does Chastity but their youngest sister, Constance, does.

You don’t say all of that though. In the blinding sun of your office parking lot you ask, “How about a drink?” Squinting toward the slivery flow of traffic, Kylo ducks his head slightly, a gesture you take as a nod. You flip on KPWX Sports and glide through intersections, listening to Mad Dog Roberts blather on about baseball. The Padres are going to have a good season, he says. The Astro’s batting has been top notch like always. The Mets need to take this time to rebuild. When you get to the Marina you lead him through the sea blue lobby to the pool house.

“The best thing to do in this hellscape,” you say, surrounded by the quiet sound of lapping water and the sharp smell of chlorine, “is cool off.”

Kylo looks at the water and the galaxy of light reflected over its surface. He’s quiet for a long second, the lights from the ceiling bathing his skin in an ethereal blueish glow. Finally, he says, “I didn’t bring a bathing suit.”

“C’mon,” you say, ducking down behind the bar. The Marina’s liquor selection is confusingly good for an out of the way hotel owned by people who used to be missionaries. You don’t question it too much; if anyone was to understand weird return on investments, it’s you. You call out to him, “I thought you wanted to have fun,” while peeking behind the sherries and the aged cognacs, looking for something a bit more appropriate for the occasion.

“So, what, I get naked?”

“Are you not wearing underwear of some kind? If you want, I think they sell bathing suits in the hotel gift shop.”

“No, it’s fine.” He sounds echoey, like he’s turned toward the door and his voice has had the chance to bounce off the absurd curved walls and domed ceiling. “They don’t mind?”

“Not for me, they don’t.”

“Fancy fancy, taxman.”

You place a bottle on the counter and peak your head back over the bar. He’s crouched by the edge of the pool, fingers testing the water’s surface. “You might want to say you’re someone important if they ask though. Eastern European prince, oil tycoon, senator’s kid—whatever works for you.”

Kylo stalks back toward the bar and reads the label of the bottle. He pushes it back toward you and says, “Honey rye? I should have known you were a bitch.”

You crouch back beneath the bar to rifle through more bottles. “Don’t make me bring out the goldschlager.”

“That’s not as bad.”

You pop your head up. “It’s one thousand percent hen night!”

“That’s why it’s not as bad. It knows what it is,” Kylo says. “But it’s fine, we’ll drink your mopey Shania Twain shit and talk about all the men whose cars we’ve keyed.”

“Hey, don’t threaten me with a good time.” You place the bottle of goldschlager on the bar then two glasses. The gold flakes swirl and shimmer as they settle. “But no, you’re the guest of honor. We drink your hen night swill and flash all the bloated tourists on the strip from the sunroof of a hot pink limo.”

“Exactly,” Kylo says, unbuckling his pants and grabbing the hem of his shirt and pulling it over his head; exposing more and more taut muscle as he goes. “A good time.”

You catch yourself staring as he shimmies of out of his pants, leaving them in a puddle on the deck, and jumps into the water.

***

And you’re not an idiot. You realized that a part of this whole lounge at the Marina plan would involve showing some skin. You’re not a shy person, so spending your off hours half naked in a semi-public pool doesn’t faze you. But it hadn’t really crossed your mind what that would mean until right now, with the water beading on Kylo’s shoulders and chest, his hair slicked across his scalp and down his neck. For a moment, your skin feels a size too tight, your blood a shade too warm. You undo the first button and goosebumps trickle down your chest.

He calls out, “What do I have to do to see some skin, taxman?” He barks out a laugh. “I bet you’re pale all over.” Kylo kicks back, floating toward the deep end of the pool. Even from this distance, you can tell his eyes are trained on your fingers as they continue down the buttons.

You can’t help but think of the last time you got laid. Too long, you realize as you fold your pants and place them on the bar. With someone impossibly dull, someone Phasma called ‘a good guy, for once.’ Like you have bad taste or something. Kylo wolf whistles as you emerge from behind the bar, exaggerated enough that he makes himself laugh. Despite that, you can still feel the heat of his eyes on your skin. Maybe you do have bad taste or something.

Maybe you are an idiot. You pour Sprite in the glasses and then a double of goldschalger on top..

***

You pull yourself together and put on Predator on the projector because they don’t have an arthouse selection. It is mostly movies that play well with midwestern families and Arizona old ladies. It was either this or Steel Magnolias. You slide into the water and settle on the underwater ledge that Kylo’s settled on. The previews play, showing ads for movies that have long since debuted and flopped. At first, you’re hyperaware of all the small eddies that his body makes he shifts in the water. You want to look but realize that there no way to interpret you gaze for anything other than what it is. You watch the screen instead. It doesn’t take long before it becomes a background consideration.

You start to ask him to pass the chips, but he shushes you. “Shh… I love this part.”

Schwarzenegger has covered himself in mud and trying to evade the alien’s thermal scanners. “Really, it’s so cheesy,” you say. You reach over Kylo’s body to grab the bowl. “I mean he should be covered in mud for the whole rest of the movie. But no, just wipes it off after a while like it’s no longer tactically useful.”

He says, eyes trained on the screen, “I bet you only watch dumb period pieces where the piano is super loud, but everyone’s voice is super quiet.”

“I don’t watch much TV.”

He snickers. “Even worse.”

“Pardon me, I actually have responsibilities that extend past getting punched in the face.” You allow yourself to look back over at his profile: his arms; shoulder; his face, the blue light from the screen making his stark features even starker. You can imagine all the work piled up on your desk. The betting slips. The appraisals. You take another sip of your drink.

Kylo shrugs. “If it was that easy more people would be good at it.”

“I’ll give you that.”

“But how did you watch Predator enough to determine it was cheesy”

You pause as Schwarzenegger creeps through the underbrush. You’re unsure about what is reasonable to share about your past with a stranger. “I was a frequent flier of sorts in my youth,” you say after a moment. “This was surprisingly popular movie on Lao Air flights in the early two thousands.”

“Posh,” he says, rounding the ‘o’ like he’s trying to put on a comedy British accent. For a moment his mouth downturns like he’s trying to suppress a chuckle. At that moment, in the dark, there’s you sense something else under the bravado and the brashness, something you can’t quite place.

“Less so than you’d imagine,” you say.

***

Schwarzenegger is machine gunning through the jungle when Kylo breaks the comfortable silence. “So how do you know Snoke?”

“I take his bets.” Which is an answer surely. Not entirely accurate but the safest.

“Bullshit. He’s a,” Kylo pauses, turns his head to train his eyes on you. You imagine again what his eyes must look like as he picks apart an opponent on the other side of the ring before he bell. Kylo settles on the words “particular person. I doubt he opened the phone book and found you.”

You say, “I run a more boutique service. Most other bookmakers wait for the major casino’s gather their data, run their algorithms, and publish their lines and just go on that. I gather my own data, calculate my own odds, and aim to provide a betting experience that…”

He snorts. “Nice elevator pitch, taxman.”

You turn back to the screen. Schwarzenegger is setting a trap. Out of the corner of your eye you can see that he’s shifted, turning his body toward yours so he can watch you more closely. You say, “He and my father worked together on a project some years ago. I’ve known Snoke since I was a teenager.” Which again is not entirely accurate but still safe enough. The real answer—my father shipped tons of heroin all over the world for Snoke; my father was killed by Snoke when he threatened to testify—somehow always ends up being a longer story than you mean it to be. To avoid such a story, you turn the question back on him. “How do you know Snoke? Like you said he’s a very particular person.”

“I broke a kid’s orbital at a fancy dinner party. He happened to know the kid’s father.”

“What Snoke offered to set you straight?”

“No, he told me my form was weak, but my spirit was strong. One you can learn the other you can’t. Next thing I know I’m doing pushups in the desert.”

“Snoke isn’t a good man, so you know.” You’re not sure why you say that. Because really it is none of your business, what Snoke does or how he does it. It isn’t your job to forewarn anyone of anything.

Kylo is waving his hands through the water, you notice. Back and forth, making little waves and eddies that break over your knees and sway under your calves. He isn’t touching you. Which you notice, so pointedly, because he brushes up against the underside of your thigh once soft and quick like it was on accident. “I know,” he says.

You ask, “That doesn’t bother you?”

He makes a face for a moment, nose scrunched. “Why would it bother me? Senators and soccer moms don’t finance bloodsport. Bloodthirsty people finance bloodsport. I have no problem accepting someone for what they are, especially if they plan on helping me get what I want.” You can hear the movie in the background, but you’re now zeroed in on the way Kylo has crept closer, like he wants to hear you, like he wants to see you. He says, “Wait, doesn’t that just mean your father wasn’t a good man?”

“I never said he was.”

He waits a beat, leans in a smidge closer. You can feel his breath, warm between you now. “Does that mean you’re not a good man?”

“I never said I was.”

Then he kisses you. Or you allow him to kiss you. When you see him steal a glance toward your mouth, you lean in and breathe the air between you, crisp with liquor and chlorine. You tip your head to the side to look, at the small sliver of scar etched into his temple. And that’s when he leans in to meet you. You see it coming clearly and you don’t move away.

Part of you, a small part but a part none the less, thinks that this is probably a terrible idea. That this goes against some sort of unspoken professional code, to engage in a physical dalliance with someone who you will inevitably balance bets on. That Snoke, while hardly the type to be concerned with anyone’s emotional wellbeing, will care if Kylo’s physical or mental state is compromised in any way. That, if you had the chance, you would love to watch him break. But again it’s a small part. After all, you never said you were a good man.

Most of your mind is devoted to thinking about warmth of his hand where it comes to rest against the underside of your knee. You spiral off into a jumbled, feverish set of thoughts about where else his sure fingers and their warmth could end up. You press your body in closer, the blare of the TV sounding a million miles away in comparison to the sound of both of your breath high in your ears. You move your hands to the base of his skull, carding your fingers through the damp hair at the nape of his neck. He skims his fingers along the underside of your thigh, higher, higher, goosebumps rising in their wake.

You’re so close that you can feel a low groan rumble in his throat and chest as you can hear it.

It lasts a minute or two maybe. Or an hour. You can hardly tell. What breaks you out of the haze was the sound of a voice coming from the other side of the pool room.

“Mr. Hux,” the voice says. “we’ve extended this privilege to you because of your continued patronage and kindness but we haven’t extended it to your colleague.” You’ve forgotten the name of this son, Ezekiel you think. One of the younger ones if you’re not mistaken, more straight laced than some of his other siblings.

Kylo pulls away from you and flashes him a megawatt smile. You can hear it in his voice when he says, “Please forgive him he wanted to show me he city’s local charm and I insisted on a dip to get away from the heat. You have a truly wonderful establishment here.” Kylo extends a hand out toward Ezekiel, an offer to shake. But Kylo doesn’t move from where he’s comfortably sprawled in the pool. He continues, “I’m fresh from New York you see, Senator Organa’s son.”

The offer to shake hands is a power move, you realize, not a half bad one either. Now Ezekiel has to walk over and crouch down toward the waterline to get his handshake from the so-called Senator’s kid. And of course, Ezekiel does so. He glances at you as he grips Kylo’s wet hand. Ezekiel says, “Have a nice night.”

When you two are alone again, with the steady patter of machine gun fire playing from the forgotten movie in the background, you say, “That isn’t the first time you’ve done that.”

“That a question, tax man?”

“Nope, observation.

“You gonna ask?”

And part of you wants to, of course. You assume that he’s not the illustrious Senator Organa’s son because surely you would have known that. You assume it’s a lie cultivated and maintained on sheer bravado alone. A lie told to make life a little easier. A lie that, like tonight, no one wants to press him on. You understand lies like that. You’ve lived and breathed them. You say, “Jangan tembak, saya anak duta”

“What does that mean?”

“Let’s say it means I’m not gonna ask.”

You want to lean back in, to feel his lips against yours but the moment has been lost. He hauls himself out of the pool to pour himself a glass water, then another. He pulls out a phone from his jeans pocket and frowns. You can imagine it’s late. He asks, “You’re not driving home right?” You shake your head. “Good, he says. “Ghat car is a bit too nice to wrap around a light post in good conscience.”

“A client put it up as collateral on the Hernandez Wyatt fight. It was almost brand new. He even accepted my appraised price of 10k. Barely 7k miles, around here that’s brand new. It’s a shame really.”

He grins at you, wolfish. You can feel the heat from before along the back of your neck. “You don’t feel remotely bad,” he says.

“Who else takes cars and paintings and scratched up bracelets as collateral in this town? No one worth their commission.”

He slides his shirt over his head, the fabric clinging to his damp skin. He hunts around for a towel on deck and rubs it over his hair like he’s a dog.

“So,” he calls out from under the fabric. “Do you want to split a cab?”

You paddle toward the shallow end of the pool, by the chairs where the rest of his clothes are piled up. “I’m gonna stay here”

“Can you get a room this late?”

“They’ll have one for me.” And they will. Probably a suite tucked on the parking lot side, quiet well into the day. “Do you want to stay?” The question is out of your mouth before you have a chance to think better of it. But once it’s past your lips you realize that it’s what you want.

“I have to be at doing suicides—no wait, they call them windsprints now—at 7. At this rate I’ll still be drunk when I wake up but at least I’ll have gotten a couple hours of sleep.”

“Who says you won’t sleep.”

“Me. And I imagine you when we get up there.”

He leaves you floating in the shallow end, flashing that grin again, slick and smug and infinitely pleased with himself. The image of that grin looming over you in the dim light sticks in your mind. You sink back, letting the water swallow you. The whole world falls into an echoey hush. You imagine that this is what it feels like right before you’re born, when you’re floating, waiting for the first day of the rest of your life to begin. 

You awake the following morning in the Coral Suite of the Marina with a sour taste in the back of your throat. You’re not sure if you’re disappointed that Kylo isn’t here with you, then decide that you shouldn’t be. In the light of day, you realize that it was impulsive, dreadfully so.

You slide back into your well-worn routine. Mitaka doesn’t mention your leaving early or showing up late the following morning. He places forms and slips that need signing on your desk and arranges for an additional cup of black coffee to be sent to your desk. As the week dissolves away, it becomes easier to forget the feel of Kylo’s body against your own in the water and the way you wanted more. You figure that Kylo has left town or has better things to do (or better people to do them with), and you won’t hear from him again.

And you keep thinking that until late one Thursday night when you get a call to your office line.

“First Order Booking, Hux speaking. How may I help you?”

“Hey, do you know any pharmacies open at this hour?”

You ask, “Who is this?” even though you can guess from the low tone.

“Kylo.” His voice sounds impatient, petulant through the phone. “The one nearest my place is closed.”

“Of course, it’s two in the morning.” And part of you wants to ask why he didn’t call after the night at the Marina. But you can’t find the words. But you don’t want to make this about that. “How did you get my office number?”

He says, “Snoke gave it to me.”

And in the time that you’ve spared to think about him over the past week or so, you’ve thought more about the way the skin on his thighs would feel under your hands than you’ve thought about his actual smug, cocksure nature, than you’ve thought about how his presumptuousness raised your hackles immediately. But now, when it’s just his voice, it comes back to you. That sneering self-confidence. You want to deny him just to bring him down a peg.

But you say, “And that gives you free reign to call me in the middle of the night?” as evenly as you can. Because of course, no matter what else you want to happen here, at its core your connection to Kylo is still professional in nature, a colleague’s protege.

“You picked up, didn’t you?”

“That’s not the—“

“Do you know of a pharmacy or not? I’m near the Finalizer gym.”

Before he can rattle of the address you tell him that you know where it is. You tell him of a mom and pop place not too far from there. They let their son and his wife man the place into the wee hours of the night, vaping something sickly sweet and watching music videos with the volume low. You tell him that they’ll be able to help you with anything he needs. He hangs up without saying even the most cursory thank you.

And again, Kylo slips off the radar. It’s not like you’re actively looking, but you can’t help but admit you’re still intrigued. You keep your ears peeled for mentions of fights or training camps. You hear nothing. You looked into getting the number he called from last time, but it’s private and unlisted. You wouldn’t expect much less from someone under Snoke’s care. You consider going down to the Finalizer gym but you don’t know what the step after that would be. It takes another week or so until your phone rings again and you’re greeted with, “Do you happen to know of an all-night doctor.”

It’s after two in the morning again. The only other soul in the building is the cleaning lady, pushing the vacuum around between the desks. Even Mitaka went home.

“Kylo, I presume. The emergency room.”

A long pause, rustling. Then he says, “I don’t really have emergency room time or money.”

“No one ever does.”

“Well, if you needed 3 maybe 4 stitches at this hour who would you call.”

“I’d stop bitching and use super glue like an adult.”

“Geez, what crawled up your ass and died?”

You take a deep breath, there’s no reason to not be professional. “Fine. Can you get downtown?” On the other end of the line, Kylo makes a sound of vague assent. You continue, “I will call in a favor, once and just this once. I’ll text you the address and that’s it. You could be in a bathtub without your liver and I’ll tell you to shove it up your ass.”

You can hear him snicker over the phone “Sexy. What did I say about threatening me with a good time?” And then he hangs up. You’re left in the blue glow of your computer, trying to imagine the shape of his mouth as he spoke.

The following morning, he calls back. The office is abuzz with the ringing phones, the chitter of _first order booking how can I help you, first order booking how can I help you,_ the hum of the copier. “Thanks,” he says after you answer. “Thatcher’s a weird dude but he did a good job.”

“Of course, he’s a weird dude. He’s willing to accept a bleeding stranger into his home in the middle of the night.”

“But yeah, I wanted to make sure I told you thanks.”

You stand up and push your door closed with your foot. You say, “How polite of you.”

“Hey, my parents raised me with manners.”

“You just choose not to use them. How charming.”

“Look, I was trying to be nice but if you’re going to be an asshole about it—“

“You’re right Kylo. I apologize. You’re welcome.” There’s silence on the line, the distant sound of rustling like Kylo is switching the phone from ear to ear. You blurt out, “Why didn’t you call Snoke?” before you can think better of it. You continue, “I’m sure he has someone who can do stitches on the payroll.”

“What, I can’t call you?” He says it like it’s a joke but there’s something in his voice that makes it feel like it’s only halfway so. Maybe you’re reading into it. Maybe you’re hearing what you want to hear.

“No, I didn’t say that. I just left most of the people who only call me when they’re bleeding in the past.”

“Well, I’ll be sure to call you when all the blood is in my body sometime.”

You think of Snoke, about what he expects of you exactly. You’re not entirely sure. For someone so exacting, his expectations can sometimes be deeply unclear. But then—you realize as you start to speak—that you’re not going to answer based on what Snoke wants of you, what Snoke expects of you. “I’d like that,” you say.

Weeks later, your phone rings as you eat take out at your desk. Pad Thai, not half bad. You ask for extra limes and they never bring them. That’s not the biggest deal though. You keep ordering because they deliver quickly.

Before you have a chance to say hello, you hear, “Hux” coming through the phone.

“Kylo. What’s the matter this time?”

He has called in the meantime. Always to ask for things, but smaller things, more trivial things. Where is a hardware store? Do you have a favorite pizza place? Once you give your answer, you chat for a few minutes. Basic stuff. ‘How have you been?’s. ‘How’s the training going?’s. ‘Business good?’s. Good. Good. Good.

“Nothing,” he says quickly. “I got locked out of my apartment.”

“Louis Dufrane at Lock Your World. His number is—“

He cuts you off before you can get through the area code. “I already called someone. They should be here soon.” He says, “I just wanted to talk. But… I bet you’re busy.”

And theoretically you are. Theoretically you always are. You’re not eating dinner in the office for no reason. But you can spare a minute or two or three. It’ll be nice to talk about something that isn’t point spreads on football games for a little while. You say, “Nothing that can’t be put off for a bit.”

“I was gonna watch a movie, but I don’t have unlimited data and the people in 1H changed their wifi password.”

“So, I’m runner up to Fast and the Furious 15?”

“They’re only up to 8. And no, you’re runner up to Total Recall.”

“You don’t know many people here.” You meant for that to be a question, but halfway through you realize it’s not. You already know the answer.

“I don’t know many people anywhere really.”

And maybe you expected hurt in that sentence, loneliness, something. But you don’t get it. He says it evenly, like it’s a fact of the universe. He doesn’t say anything else, like it needs no explanation. You pause. You want to tell him you know what that’s like, but you figured he didn’t call you to talk about that. Instead, you ask if he plans on incorporating more mat based offense into strategies. About that he has plenty to say.

An hour later, he’s in his apartment. He says, “Thanks for making sure I didn’t get kidnapped while sitting on my doorstep.”

You crack a smile. “Just doing my neighborly duty.”

“Man, if you were my neighbor this would have been much easier. I bet you I’d already have already earned a spare key to your place.”

“ _If_ you were my neighbor. How exactly would you earn that?”

“Dealer’s choice.”

And before you can press, before you can hear his husky voice explain exactly what would be on the table, he tells you that he has to go, he tells you thank you again. He hangs up and leaves you listening to silence on the other end of the line.

From then, he’ll call with nothing to ask. Generally deep in the night, he often calls when everyone has already left the office for your other life. This, it turns out, is your other life. You talk about the normal minutiae of everyday things. He tells you about the repairs his landlord is avoiding. You tell him about your ongoing saga with the phone and internet guy. Normal stuff. You remember what he said when he was locked out of his apartment—that he doesn’t know anyone anywhere really. And even though you’ve lived in Vegas for around a decade; even though you have friends, and you have colleagues; even though he can be insufferably smug, insolent, argumentative; even though he seems to have a poor understanding of the hours you keep and the responsibilities you do; he calls you like you’re the person he knows, like he’s the person you know. And it might be small, but it’s enough to make you answer whenever he calls even if you know you’re going to hang up on him two minutes later.

So, one night— or early morning, better yet, was already past two in the morning when he called— after talking the many ways auto repair shops try scam you and how it’s almost impossible to find a good freezer secondhand these days, you hit a lull in the conversation. Kylo is buzzed, comfortably so you imagine. Occasionally, you hear the click-hiss of a can opening. His words have been loose, flowing together like water. You can hear his breath over the phone. You’ve learned to be okay with these long pauses. You’re so used to hanging up with people as soon as they stop being useful that it was odd at first, to listen to someone exist without interfering. You keep typing away, inputting numbers into spreadsheet after spread sheet. It’s another moment until Kylo says, “I’m going to say something way out of bounds.”

“Okay.”

He seems hesitant as he says, “I like your voice.”

“That’s not way out of bounds,” you say. He’s made a dozen shitty jokes about your accents since you first met. Sometimes, he puts on an accent like he’s doing his worst Dick Van Dyke impression. You say, “Perhaps it lacks a little tact but if there’s something you consistently lack it is tact.”

“No wait,” he says, a touch quieter, like he’s trying to tell a secret. “I mean it turns me on. I like your accent. I like the way you use words like ‘tact’ at three in the morning. I imagine you telling me what to do. Is that out of bounds?”

“Slightly. But I’ve heard things that are more out of bounds. Kylo, are you sure you want to have this conversation?”

You wanted to give him an out. But he doesn’t want to take it. Now that he’s started talking, it seems that he’s worked up the courage to keep going. He says, “I imagine you all buttoned up sitting in that desk chair in your office while I kneel on the floor and jerk off. I imagine you making me kiss your ankles lick my come off the floor before I can touch your cock. Is that out of bounds?”

You have to admit you are surprised. You saw his imposing height, his easy bravado and assumed that he’d be a hunter through and through. But no, you could hear a faint whimper as he rattled off his words. But no, he imagines himself, on the floor beneath you. You can hear his breath coming through the line, shallow. You remember the kiss you shared, floating in the water. You remember that same breath against your lips.

And you consider yourself someone with self control, someone who makes good choices, reasonable choices. But you also know, deep down, that you are hardly a man to turn down something you want forever, especially when its so sweetly offered.

You get up and click the lock on your door. There’s no chance of someone coming in to interrupt you at this hour, but you need to make doubly sure. You say, “That’s not what you want to know, right, if it’s out of bounds?”

A pause. Kylo asks, “What do I want to know?”

“If I’d do it.”

And there’s something wonderful to the tenor of his voice when he asks, “Would you?” something breathless and hopeful.

You clear your throat, “Well, Kylo, what are you doing right now?

He laughs, “Can you guess?”

“I can. But I want to hear you say it.” on the other end of the line, he groans. You can hear rustling. You continue, “I’m going to hang up if you aren’t clear and forward with me okay? I’m going to hang up and then tomorrow were going to go on like none of this ever happened. Are we clear?”

“Yeah. Crystal.”

“So Kylo, what are you doing right now.”

He tells you. He tells you about how he’s fucking his fist, about how he’s pinching his nipples, about how he would love to gag on your cock, how he dreams about it, how he thought about following you up to that room in that crummy hotel and letting you fuck his face. Once he’s come and you’ve come—memorizing the way his voice broke as he moaned out your name—he says thank you and hangs up, all cordial like.

You’re left wiping your hands in the shadowy dark of your office, wondering if you were dreaming.

It happens again, of course. And again, and again. Always late, late at night. He opens with his _hello_ s, his how are _you_ s. He talks about the weather—hot as always, dry as always. And eventually, the conversation shifts. He tells you what he’s wearing, what he’s not wearing, he tells you how good it feels. He tells you about all the things he would do to you, as if you don’t live in the same city. You tell him too—about how you want to ride his cock, work yourself to orgasm without using your hands—like you don’t live in the same city. Like it’s entirely theoretical.

Each time, when you hang up and are left in the shadowy dark of your office, you wonder if you’ve always been a coward or if this is a new thing.

***

Years and years ago, after the second time someone tried to hold up First Order Booking, you changed policies: people have to stop by the office on a specific day and time to collect their cash winnings. But, occasionally, for a VIP client, you are willing to deliver their winnings to them at their leisure. Generally, Mitaka does this kind of thing now a days. Back when you first started the business, you’d do it yourself, driving all over Nevada in your one good suit. You’d listen to oldies on the radio, the sound of long dead singers crooning through the airwaves helping you stay awake. Eventually, it stopped being worth your time.

But when you get a delivery request from the owner of the Finalizer gym— Mr. Hutton, a grease ball who loves betting on women’s basketball of all things—you tell Mitaka you’ll handle it yourself. 

“Are you sure, sir?”

“I just want to take a ride.”

You’re not even sure when Kylo trains there. But when you saw the slip you couldn’t help but say yes to it. If you were a different person, one who believed in fate, one who believed in destiny, you would say that it was a sign for you to go and try to seek out Kylo. But you’re not that kind of person. You’re the person who believes in inevitabilities—that, of course, this slip would come across your desk eventually; that, of course, you were going to seek Kylo out again, eventually. That it was just a matter of time.

As luck would have it, Kylo is there. (You learn later that its hardly luck. Kylo spends virtually all of his time here.) You watch Kylo duck and weave with a speed bag out of the corner of your eye as Hutton counts his money. He’s fast. Strong too. He throws his punches like he’s trying to batter through walls. You see why Snoke saw potential in him. He’s not someone you’d want to fuck with. Well, that’s not entirely right, but that’s a different matter entirely.

He looks surprised when he notices you. He quirks his head to the side for a moment and holds a handout to stop the speed bag from swinging back and forth.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

If you were a different person, an honest person, you’d tell him that you wanted to see him. That you dreamed about the heat of his body against yours. Instead, you say, “Work.” It’s not exactly untrue.

“Really?” He asks. He picks a towel up off the ground and drapes it over his sweat drenched head. “Work just brings you by me?”

“Work brings me all over the place.”

He asks, “You live near here, right?”

“Well, what counts as near?”

He leans in a bit, like he wants to inspect you, like he wants to devour you. You forgot how tall he is. “That’s not what I’m asking.”

\--

For what he had planned, what you both had planned if you’re being honest, your place is plenty close. He tails you in his car. When you double check your rearview mirror to make sure he’s still behind you, a thrill you can’t quite identify rolls down your spine. He parks his car next to yours in the lot and follows you into the elevator. He crowds you once the door closes, pressing you against the wall and kissing you deeply. You don’t make it to your bed. You ride him on your couch, thighs shaking with the exertion. You want to pin his wrists down and tell him to be still, to drive him to the edge and leave him there. But you don’t, what people say on the phone to get themselves off isn’t necessarily what they’re into

Afterwards, after he’s cleaned himself up, and found both of his socks and his car keys from under the coffee table, he says, “you know that I meant it right, what I said on the phone” and leaves you alone in your apartment, wondering.


	2. Part 2

The next day, you draw up a rider on a stack of overdue betting slips. Mitaka gave these to you for review last night and normally, normally you would have had these back on his3 desk by 8am sharp. They'd be separated with color coded paper clips: white for written notices, blue for phone calls from the receptionist Dolores, yellow for follow-up phone calls from Mitaka, red for a visit from the Day Gone By collections agency, black for the ones you handle personally.

Instead, you’re drafting a contract of conduct and service for your _thing_ with Ren, waffling over the usage of the word _dick_ or _cock_ , _come_ or _orgasm_ , and feeling like an utter creep.

You close the document. It’s not like it’s getting any better the more you look at it. You decide to text Kylo. _Texts_. God, what has your life come to. You type out, _what are you doing tonight._ Barely a minute goes by before you get a response, _Getting punched in the stomach._ Then a moment later, another message, _Why?_

What _has_ your life come to?

You tap out _Want to come over to the office?_ And press send.

He stops by your office after he’s done training. His hair is still wet, slicked back along his neck. You can see the hint of the hickey you left low on his throat. You chose your office because you wanted this to be businesslike. Because you want to lay down ground rules, real ones, reasonable ones. Because you didn’t want to talk about butt plugs in a diner and knew that you wouldn’t be able to talk about them in your apartment without this becoming something else.

When he leaves through the papers, he looks incredulous. “Should I have my lawyer look this over?”

“I hardly think that’s necessary,” you say. “Unless you have an untraditional relationship with your lawyer and want to make it more exciting.”

He stops on a page that has ‘impact play’ bolded with a list beneath it. He holds the paper closer to his face. After a moment he says, “The last thing piece of paper I had to sign this much was for the WFO.”

Which you know is a gross overstatement. There’s barely a half dozen papers in this packet. You say, “Well excuse me for taking your safety and enjoyment seriously.

“You don’t do this often, do you?” he says absentmindedly. He’s flipped through to the next page. Degradation, if you’re not mistaken.

“I was going to say the same thing.” You fish a pen out from your desk drawer and place it in front of him. “Now I want you to fill out this questionnaire and afterwards we’ll compare responses.”

***

You weren’t sure what you were expecting. You weren’t sure—as he worried the pen between his teeth, filling out his answers—if what he meant by ‘kinky shit’ was a using a mall kiosk polyester tie on birthdays and Christmas. You weren’t sure if when you went to exchange lists, that he’d be horrified at what he saw. That has happened to you before and its not an experience you want to repeat.

As it turns out that your list and his overlap, more so than you let yourself hope. He was more so into pain than you are naturally, marking things like caning, flogging, whipping, beating and spanking with double checks in the _Receiving/Favorite_ box. But that’s something you can handle with that. For things like begging, gagging, orgasm control he checked _Liked/Receiving._ You’re happy to see that. He arches an eyebrow as he reads through your list.

He puts the pen on the table between you as he says, “See, we didn’t have to take all this time on a Thursday night to do this.”

You take his responses and place them in your copier. You’d prefer to have duplicates if necessary. Kylo makes a face as you press the buttons and the machine springs to life. You say, “You would have been really pissed off if I was super into force feeding and didn’t mention it.”

To that he shrugs. He slides on his jacket. “So, when do you want to do the practical exam? Or do we have to wait for someone to proctor?”

“Just come over this Sunday.”

Kylo shows up on Sunday with last dredges of black eye, already greenish yellow around the edges. Before you have a chance to ask if he’s okay, if he wants to reschedule, if he really wants to do this, he tells you he’s fine, he tells you not to worry about it, he tells you that he’s had worse before. He smirks and tells you, “hopefully I’ll have worse later.” He seems to get a certain amount of glee from watching the corners of your mouth downturn.

You step out of the doorframe and motion him inside.

Let it be said that Kylo is kind enough to bring you coffee. He presses the cup into your hand as he passes through the door. It’s acrid, burnt, under sweetened. “Where did you get this from? A baseball stadium?”

“A gas station. Are you always this prissy?”

“Just wondering.” You take another sip, long and theatrical. You do appreciate the caffeine though, and something to keep your hands busy, something else to focus on. You don’t want to admit it, but you’re a bit nervous. You haven’t done _this_ in a long time. “So,” you ask. “What do you want to do today?”

“Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?” Kylo tips back over the arm of your couch and sprawls, shoes on, overly comfortable. Like since he’s been bare assed on it once before there’s no need for the niceties of ‘ _May I_ ’s and ‘ _Thank you_ ’s. He says, “Decide and shit.”

“I like hearing suggestions.”

He bats his eyelashes like he’s in a movie, saying “Punish me daddy, I’ve been naughty.” He holds your gaze for a moment, too earnest, too open, too early. Kylo doesn’t seem like the type to give you anything easily.

“Ugh, shut up,” you say. “I’m not your father.”

He barks a loud laugh, laying back all the way on the couch, hands folded under his mop of black hair. “Good thing, I didn’t do shit he told me.”

You sit on the edge of the coffee table across from where he’s scuffing up the fabric of your couch cushions, feeling preposterous for a moment. It’s odd, that someone is so able to make people accommodate him is here to do this with you. If someone, for some reason, had asked that first moment you met, him looming over your desk, you would have assumed that he loved to make people crawl for him. You imagine in other contexts he does. But now, but here, but this, no. You wouldn’t have imagined that. You say, “Look where it’s gotten you. With a black eye, eager to kneel in front of a man you barely know.”

“To be fair, the black eye and the kneeling are unrelated.”

“To be fair, I’m not sure if most people would think that was better.”

Kylo pushes himself up on his elbows. “Are you just gonna talk shit taxman? Cause I could go anywhere for that.”

You take another sip of the coffee. You are stalling, he’s observant enough to know that. Time to get started. You point to the section of carpet between the couch and the coffee table. “Hands and knees. Keep your back level.” You shake the coffee cup, about half full now, between you. “If you spill so much as one drop of this, we’ll be done for the day.”

He tilts his head to the side a tad, like a dog hearing a sound in the distance. “Wait, really?”

“Of course. Do you think that this taxman plays around? We’ll try again next time and next time until you get it.”

“For how long.”

“No chance I’m telling you that ahead of time.”

He pauses, like he’s considering it, like this wasn’t what he was expecting. Good. He licks his lips. “And if I do what you want?”

“Then we move on.”

He holds your gaze again, but this time his eyes are narrowed a bit, more cautious, more wary, more challenging. He slides off the couch and settles onto his hands and knees in front of you, eyes trained on you until you place the cup on his spine. This feels right, he’s surely not someone who will give you anything easily.

—

After nearly fifteen minutes, Kylo’s breathing has steadied. The muscles on his back and shoulders twitch the slightest bit with the exertion of keeping them still, but otherwise he’s calm. You can see from where you’re still sitting on the coffee table that he’s closed his eyes, his head hanging loose. You’ve taken out your phone and cycled through emails—a bunch from Mitaka about business, a handful from people who perceive themselves as VIP clients that loathe dealing with Mitaka and insist on emailing with you only, a couple from various scouts you have out digging through garbage and collating tape—and started tapping out replies. _Make sure to collect money the blue sticker betters this weekend, don’t let them sweet talk their way into another week without paying// I’ll be out of the office all day, Mr. Alexander. I’ll contact you first thing tomorrow with the details//Are you sure that Brunson’s fiancé is leaving him? Any chance of reconciliation?._ At first, Kylo kept trying to crane his neck to see you, to see what you were doing, but the cup would wobble and he’d look forward again, evening his back out. He sniffed and huffed like an impatient kid. He even goaded you you: _what are you waiting for taxman_? _can you not get it up, taxman?_ _Are you googling how to get someone off over there?_ You didn’t look up from the screen, didn’t break the pace of your typing added another ninety seconds to your running clock for each one. You thought about moving so you were behind him, safely out of sight, so he’d have to accept going through this blind. But here is perfect, he has to choose to not look at you, actively and continually. He has to choose to let this happen how you want this to happen. Now, he has seemed to slip out of the hyperaware stage and gone someplace deeper, some place stiller. You can work with this.

“I have to admit,” you say, sliding your phone back into your pocket. Kylo tenses up when you start talking but notices the shifting of the cup and corrects himself. “I did have ideas about what we should do today.” You lean forward the slightest bit, close enough that you can catch the faint scent of his soap off his skin. “I’ve been thinking about it a bit, you know. You said you didn’t fuck around, and I like that. I’ve been thinking ropes, paddles, clothes pins. I have a trunk in the bedroom full of great stuff. Vibrators, switches, cuffs, zip-ties. Candles. I’ve had those for a while now and I’ve really been dying to use them. I have a string of beads that…” You pause, savoring the way his breath is coming and going shallow and quick as you speak. You don’t mind being honest here, too honest; you don’t mind giving up ground like this when you’re speaking to the curve of his neck instead of to his face. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot actually,” you say. “But, I have to admit, that, in my heart of hearts, I’m a simple man. I have no pleasure in having things that are not freely offered.” You stand up from your seat on the coffee table. His eyes dart over to where you’re rounding the table, coming to crouch in front of his downturned face, the crown of his head draped with in black, black hair. You reach into your pocket, pulling out a small spool of gauzy fabric. “So, this is what we’re going to do today: I’m going to keep it very simple—first times and all. I’m going to tie your wrists with some fabric just like this. Even I, someone who can’t bench press small car, can snap it with enough effort. All you have to do is not break it. Does that sound good?” He’s silent except for the sound of his breath rushing out of his nose. You reach forward and grab the cup, take a sip. It’s not warm anymore, still bitter, but better now for what it’s been through. Kylo peeks his head up when the weight disappears but ducks his head down immediately. “You may speak.”

And the words he says, so delicious, they make a shiver run down your spine. “Yes, sir.”

—

You wore this belt for this reason. The leather is soft and supple while still being sturdy. The buckle isn’t bulky. You told him to strip to the underwear and lean over the arm of your couch. He was already half hard in his briefs but he made no move to cover himself and you didn’t acknowledge it. There’ll be time for it later. When you tied his hands, he tested the give by wiggling his wrists and settled against the upholstery.

You snap the belt against your palm so you can see the muscles in his back jump with the surprise. “I want you to count.”

“How many?” He says. You snap the belt against your palm again, a second time, a third time. He clears his throat. “How many, sir?”

“That wasn’t that hard, was it? Fifteen.” You rest the belt against the swell of his bare thigh. You swear you can see the muscle twitch in anticipation. “Count down.”

You rear your hand back and swing. Impact play isn’t necessarily your thing, but the way he stiffens and groans deep in his chest is. He sucks in a breath, then says, “fifteen.”

You think about getting nitpicky with the lack of sir, but you decide to let it go. You can perfect it later, because, if it’s up to you, there will definitely be a later. Your dick is already hard, straining against your pants. There will definitely be another time, another two or three or five, or as many as Kylo will allow you.

You swing again, hitting the section of pale skin just below the reddened swatch from the first strike.

“Fourteen,” he says. You hit the same strip of skin again, immediately. His shoulders flex and his back bows a little bit. The white fabric around his wrists stretches a bit until he immediately stops. “Fuck. Thirteen.”

You switch to the other side and give it to more quick ones, right over the same place. Twelve and eleven come out breathy, half a moan as he arches his back and presses his ass and legs out toward you. A thin layer of sweat has settled over his back and arms. You want to lean forward and lick up his spine, bite the skin where his neck meets his shoulder. But you don’t want to confuse the role too much. Not now, not yet. You wait a long moment for the next one. Long enough that you he starts to shift on his feet, expectant. You’re in charge here.

You catch him across the swell of his ass and he bucks forward, hips stuttering into empty air. he moans into the arm of your couch, long and uninhibited. A moment later, he remembers. “Ten.”

You work your way through the remaining ten, testing the whole way. How hard does he like it, how fast does he like it. He makes a low throaty moan if you strike hard on meaty places but a higher pitched panting sound if you lightly swipe the soft skin of the near his flanks or the backs of his knees. You catalog each hitch of breath and each sound as you work your way through nine to one.

You place your belt on the coffee table. His thighs are a criss crossed with marks, reddened and raising. “How do you feel?”

“Good, sir.” He sounds a thousand miles away, like you’re talking down into the bottom of a well. He shifts his shoulders but takes care to keep his wrists pressed together behind his back.

“Sir?” You say, moving so you’re standing by where his face is pressed into the arm of the couch. “You want to be polite now?” From this angle you can see the obscene press of his dick against his briefs, the wet spot spreading across the front.

“Yes sir,” he says.

“That’s good. Kneel for me.” He slides to the floor, shuffling until his knees are right in front of your shoes. “What do you want?”

“Anything you want, sir?”

“Well,” you say, placing your hand on the back of his neck. The hair there is sweaty, pasted to the curve of his neck, like he’s gone through a fight. “I like hearing suggestions. What would you like?”

“To suck your cock, sir.” You look down at his lips, plump from being bitten as you worked him over with the belt. You were hoping he’d say that. Power of suggestion perhaps. You move your other hand to undo the button and zipper to your pants. You push them down so your dick springs free. He tips his head forward a sliver and stops himself. He looks up at you, eyes trained on yours and says, “Please, sir.” And there’s that openness, that eagerness.

“Absolutely, Kylo.”

Part of you wants to tighten the grip you have on the base of his skull and fuck his face, but with his hands bound you decide against it. You didn’t go over things like humming out a tune for a safeword and have no intention of stopping him to go over it now. Another time, you figure. Next time.

He’s worked his way down the shaft of your cock until his nose brushes against the cropped thatch of hair at the base. He pulls back and does it again. His eyes have slipped closed and his mouth is shiny wet. You struggle to keep your eyes open, so you can memorize the way he holds his chest out so he doesn’t disrupt the tie on his wrist, the way he’s shuffled closer so he can get a better angle.

When you were planning this, you had a longer more elaborate scheme in mind at first. A cock ring, intricate knot work, a series of plugs. But then you reconsidered. You didn’t want to scare him the first time out. You wanted to keep it easy, so you could get a sense of each other. You’re glad you did but not for any of those reasons necessarily. You didn’t realize how into you’d be, how hard it is to hold yourself back now that you’ve felt the wet heat of his mouth. That first night, floating in the water of the Marina hotel’s pool, you thought about it but you didn’t think you’d get to have this. He slides down to the base and sucks all the way back to the tip. You move your fingers from where they’ve come to rest on the back of his neck and fit them along the side of his jaw, so you can feel it work as he sucks you. It’s better than you imagined. You can feel the eagerness come off his skin. Someone so pompous and cocky, so headstrong, moaning as your cock brushes the back of their throat. You can feel that you’re getting close. You hold his face still and pull your dick free. He looks up at you, dazed and confused for a moment, blinking like you’ve just tapped him awake.

“Open your mouth.”

You hold his face where it is, moving your fingers so you can press your thumb into the corner of his lips to hold them even wider. You don’t need to you realize. He’s not straining against you. His body is taut light a bowstring, carefully perched in way you’ve arranged him, the angle of his head, the curve of his spine, the set of his shoulders. You could walk away and come back, and he’d still be waiting, underwear tented, waiting for you to come in his mouth. (Once, when drunk with Phasma at some shitty post fight party, you tried to explain what it was you liked about this. You couldn’t quite put it into words, not eloquently at least, but this was what you were trying to get at. It drives you wild to see what people will do, how far they will go, what they are willing to give you.) You stroke yourself quickly, feeling your balls tighten as you hurtle toward climax. You feel like you come forever, painting his lips and chin as you do. His eyes flutter closed, and he pressed out his tongue, trying to catch the final drops.

You slide to your knees and slip your hand into his briefs. Kylo presses his forehead into your shoulder and moans, dick straining against your hand. Your own come is smearing on the shoulder of your shirt but you don’t care. He sounds wrecked, panting as you work him to orgasm. He trembles all the way through it.

***

You figure the shirt is past salvageable, so you unbutton it and the corner to dab off the last bit of come on his face. “So how was that?” You’re sitting across from him, now acutely aware of the fact you’re just sitting on the floor. You stand up. He leans back against the couch. He smiles, a real one. No cocky bravado, no predatory bullshit. He breathes out a laugh and rests his head against the seat of the couch. You can see his pulse thrumming in the veins in his throat.

“Pretty fucking good taxman.”

You go to the kitchen and come back with a glass of water. You sit next to him, shoulder to shoulder, he feels so warm, so solid. He tips his head over onto your shoulder. “I didn’t do any serious damage?” you ask.

“Hardly. You took it easy on me. I get worse than that sparring.” Given the fact he already showed up bruised, you’re not sure how to take that. Before he leaves, you’ll inspect the welts, make sure there’s no broken skin or odd bruising. But now, you let him sip the water in peace. You let yourself savor the weight of his body against yours.

“Do you like it half as much?”

“You have me there.”

A long moment of silence stretches between you but its comfortable. he places the glass and the towel on the floor beside him and he shuffles even closer to you, more of his body pressed against yours. You consider moving you some place more comfortable than your living room rug, but you decide against it for now. This moment feels too nice to break up. Eventually, you’ll shoo him out of your house, eventually you’ll move on with the rest of your life, but for right now you savor this moment. 

***

It becomes a regular thing. You want to go as far as to schedule it, set a repeating appointment every other Sunday from 11:30 to 2, the kind of worship you could believe in. But Kylo said no. _Good god, what is this driver’s ed? We can let each other know a few days in advance like regular people_. And you want to point out that you guys are in no way regular people, but that seems besides the point.

So yeah, a regular thing.

Whenever he shows up he talks shit. It’s schoolyard bullshit, you know. He wants to get a rise out of you, wants to throw you off your game. Somehow, even though you both know he’s going to yield, he can’t let himself not put up a fight. It doesn’t bother you. You drink the coffee he brings with him, steadily better each time. At first you figure that whatever gas station he’s going to is getting better coffee until you realize its coming from someplace else, someplace that has beans that aren’t burnt and water that doesn’t smell faintly of chlorine. You want to ask where he’s getting it from, but you don’t want to make a big deal out of it. You take another sip while he works through the insults he has this time. _What you can’t get it up taxman? Run out of ideas yet? You’ve been getting pretty weak on me, I bet you won’t make me break a sweat. There’s this guy down at the Gas’n’Go who seems like he could turn me out. How about I’ll spare you the heavy lifting. Pansy, weakling, blue-blooded panty-sniffing creep_.

“Are you quite finished,” you ask once he’s done. “Because I had something else I wanted to do with my afternoon.”

You pull out your paddle, the one that was given to you as half as a joke in a previous relationship. In the breakup you retained custody of it. It’s served you well, better than the ex ever did. You swing until your arm is sore and Kylo’s ass and thighs are hot and red. Once, he came untouched, spilling on the arm of your couch. You had him kneel, heels pressed against his reddened skin as he licked up the mess.

Or you slap him across the face. You’re buried deep in Kylo and he eggs you on. _Harder. Harder. Is that all you’ve got, pussy._ Which does bother you a little bit, you have to admit. Not the insult, which is weak for him, but the vague insinuation that you’re incapable of doing worse as opposed to actively choosing to be reasonable. But you grab him by the chin, hold his face in place so he’s forced to look you in the eyes. “You’ll take what I give you you fucking brat.” Your hips don’t still as you hold him in place, you can see his eyelids start to flutter.

Or you put on a pair of boots you haven’t worn in years, leather and heavy. Who fucking needs them in the Nevada heat. You, now, you guess. You shine them because you figure it goes with the whole aesthetic. You wanted to text and ask if the shine was necessary for the the appeal but you couldn’t figure out how to word such a request without giving away the surprise. You figure—stepping down on the soft of his thigh while he moans, jerking himself off—that it certainly didn’t hurt.

Or you make him crawl on his hands and knees across the room to lick your come off the wood floor. (You mopped before hand, you’re not a savage.) This was after you had had him kneel on the other side of the room with a vibrator pressed against his prostate, buzzing loud enough to be heard faintly beneath his heavy breathing. You told him he couldn’t touch himself, that he couldn’t take his eyes off of you while you stroked yourself to orgasm. You’re not an exhibitionist at heart, but it was worth it for the noises he made—half pained and half starved. He licked the floor until it shone and did it again for his own release.

Or you lay your hands across his throat, his pulse thrumming high and wild against your palm. You count down—three, two, one—and press against his windpipe. You keep count in your mind as you fuck into him. After 15 you lift your hand and he gasps in a breath, like he’s just surfaced from a deep water and he’s starving for air. His voice is gravely when he asks you, _again again again._ You crowd in close so you can nip at his lips, his ears, at the skin of his throat just next to your fingers before you press again.

Or you tie him up with silk rope to watch him flex against them. You take your time tying them, pretty knots, intricately looped. Part of you wants to take a picture but you realize what a bad idea that would be as you move to pick up your phone. Instead, you commit io memory. You press your lips to the red marks they leave once he’s untied.

Afterwards, he’s most of the way sweet. He talks about how he’s spent the intervening days while he rests his head in your lap. You play with his hair and his eyes drift closed. He tells you about bench pressing, about the speed bag, about takedown drills. He tells you about the burn in his muscles after a long day of training. He tells you about thrill of adrenaline once the bell rings, how addictive it is. He tells you how he’ll chase that feeling to the ends of the earth.

And eventually he starts stopping by when he’s in the area. At first you were confused: you know his gym isn’t particularly close to here, his apartment on the other side of town. You start to say that you don’t like playing with no warning, but he says he’s not here to play. _What man, we can’t fuck vanilla style anymore?_ Which, tastelessly as its phrased, _is_ endlessly appealing. You let him in, have him fuck you slow on your bed until you shake. _Some real romance movie shit_ , as he says, laying a warm washcloth on your belly. You don’t remember showing him where they were but you realize he’s been here enough that he probably found them on his own weeks and weeks ago.

And you start keeping protein powder in your cabinets. You can’t stand the stuff. It has a chalky aftertaste that can’t be masked by any flavor. Kylo, as a part of his endless training regimen, drinks heaps of it a day. You scold him when he leaves a thin film of powder on your countertops. You give him directions, _wet a cloth, wipe the counter, shake out dust into the sink_. He rolls his eyes but listens. The ties are still out. It turns out that everything is a game waiting to be played.

And you bandage knuckles. You buy antiseptic, gauze, medical tape. You seal a split in his skin closed with super glue. _I told you it works, you baby. Now stop letting your hands fall when you’re waiting for an opening. You’re not so tall that people can’t hit you in the face._

And he calls you from the parking lot once. “No really, you have to come down here,” he says. You slide on your shoes and wait for the elevator. You’re about to remind him that you’re not into public shit when you see him crouched under Ms. Calloway’s car at the far side of the lot. “Go around that way,” he says. And when you look underneath, there’s a cat brilliant orange and trembling, huddled up against a wheel. The ropes you had laid out for today go unused. You split up and knock on doors. Up and down the floors, up and down the block. _Do you know this cat? Do you know this cat?_ She's no one’s, as it turns out, all alone in the world. You call her Millicent and he doesn’t laugh. Maybe you attract lost things.

A few months later, when Jose Corea shatters his ulna and can’t fight his upcoming match, the WFO scramble for replacements. Their first choice has already been contracted to a charity fight in his home country, he’s not cancelling to be someone’s not-first choice in a non-title match up. The second choice gets caught up in a parole violation. He cannot leave the state of Florida for six to nine months. You hear all this from the assistant to the director of the WFO. It turns out that the director has a passion for horse racing and a need for a discreet betting service. The assistant asks, “Do you know any fight ready heavyweights who can get in the ring on short notice? We’re looking for anyone here.”

“Hunter Russel,” you say. “Allen Erso. Kylo Ren as well. He’s always in fight shape. Julian Katan.”

You don’t realize that you’ve said Kylo’s name before it’s already in the air between you. You don’t mention it to Kylo because you figure it’ll amount to nothing. He wasn’t even the first name out of your mouth.

Kylo calls you about five minutes after the updated match card came across your desk. He sounds amazed. _Holy shit man. Did you hear?_ You say that you had but don’t mention that Snoke called you about five minutes before that _. I wanted to make sure that I thanked you personally Armitage,_ he said, _for all of your hard work._

And you want to say _this is hardly work_ but realized that you don’t know what it is.

You turn that question over in your mind every once in a while—what is this? You never settle on a good answer. Life goes on regardless. You go to work. Kylo comes by your place, he criticizes your lack luster movie selection, he gargles water after you face fuck him, you order Mexican food. Life goes on. 

One day, Kylo sends you a text— _the fuxking hot water is always shitty here._ Then another: _Im gonna shower at your place._

When you come to pick up Kylo at Finalizer gym, you park around the block. Kylo has repeatedly offered to get you a parking pass for the complex but you keep putting it off.

The last time he asked you said, “You’re an athlete, a five minute walk won’t kill you now will it?” You said, “It’s free to park on the street. I refuse to pay money to wait around for you to dillydally in that rank locker room.” 

Like a smug git, he replied, “more like 7 or 8 minutes.” He replied, “it won’t kill you to take something from me now will it?

“I can’t let you get the upper hand,” you said, half joking. He grinned back at you, cat like, smug. You said, “A good bookie never owes anyone anything.”

Now, you tap out a message back to him. _Hurry up. I want to stop by the cleaners before they close._ You lean up against door of the car. In the sprawling shade of the side street with an iced coffee, the heat isn’t so oppressive. You can hear the low buzz of midafternoon traffic coming from the other side of the buildings, but this small stretch of street is quiet—made up mostly of inlets for long term parking lots and run down, second hand furniture stores. You turn and place the coffee you brought for Kylo—cream, no sugar, not too much ice— on the hood of your car as A third text comes through: _don’t pop a blood vessel. Ill be there in minute._

Before you can type out a reply, a sharp pain blooms on the back of your skull. You stumble forward onto the hood of your car, spilling both cups over the silver paint. Someone is grips you by the shoulders and hauls you back up onto your feet, spins you around. You’re face to face with a man with wired eyes. He breathes hard, blowing his sour breath over your face. You feel something cool against your neck. “Make a noise and I’ll fucking gut you, Hux!”

The fog from the shot to the back of your head start to lift once you hear your name. He knows you but you’re blanking on him. With his five o’clock shadow and slightly crooked teeth, he could be just about anyone. You nod, put your hands up, palms out. Calm but deferential is what you’re trying to project. You avoid eye contact and keep still. You want to buy yourself some time and every second counts.

(As a child, one of our father’s associates, Rae Sloane, taught you a series of phrases in different languages. She coached you on pronunciation, on intonation. They all mean the same thing: _don’t shoot I’m an ambassador’s son_. A baldfaced lie, but one designed to give you enough time to gain the upper hand in a situation. _Making someone falter, even for a moment_ , she would say, _could mean the difference between life and death. The more time you get, the better off you are._ Such a lie won’t help you here but still you can’t help but remember her careful attention to how you accentuated the vowels, over which consonants were silent. _This kind of thing can save your life_.)

“I should fucking kill you,” he says. “You lousy rat.” He presses the blade in against the soft flesh of your throat.

But your skin hasn’t been broken. A dull knife, you realize. _Should_ kill you, he said, not will. Did he not come out today looking to kill you? Did he run into you by accident? Or did he come out looking only to scare you? 

He tightens his on your shirt collar and darts his gaze back and forth. “That Anderson/Isaacs fight was fixed wasn’t it?” he says. You look around as much as you can without making any sudden movements. From what you can see no one is coming. You don’t hear any cars or footsteps approaching. He leans in closer, like he wants to keep the noise down and says, “You take a hard-working man’s money to line your rich friends’ pockets. But they aren’t here now, are they? I want my money back or I want your fucking neck.” You can feel his hands tremble in your shirt.

_He hasn’t killed me yet and he’s anxious about being discovered_ , you think. _If I can keep him talking until someone comes down the street, he’ll probably get spooked and leave. Kylo should be here soon. Someone that size should scare this man off._

“I don’t fix fights I just take bets on them. Please, let go of my shirt and we can talk about this like adults.” You train your gaze on him and try to exude a sense of calm, of control. “I’m sure I can sort out your issue if you give me a moment to breathe.” His hand loosens from your collar just a smidge, the knife edges away from your skin just enough for you to take a deep breath. Progress. “Please, Mr…”

“Dawson.”

“Absolutely, Mr. Dawson. I always remember a valued long-term customer.”

This is only half a lie. You vaguely remember a Dawson from the Anderson/Isaacs fight. One of the associates took the bet but Mitaka flagged it. But the specifics don’t matter for the moment. Now, that he’s given you his name, you have enough to work with so you can talk yourself out of this.

Once, years ago. Mitaka suggested that you buy a gun. “Forgive me sir,” he had said, “but we are in a rather dangerous line of work and you are quite _distinct_ looking sir.” His child-like mouth was downturned. Instead of dignifying his absurd comment with a response, you sent him to the printers to order more betting slips. For a while after that Mitaka left pamphlets and brochures for gun ranges and self-defense classes peppered in with your papers—bullshit like _Don’t just cope with your fears, conquer them_ and _Self Reliance, the American way_. You never bought said gun because you have no interest in shooting anybody. You still don’t. You’d much rather talk yourself free.

(The other thing Rae Sloane taught you, never pull a gun on someone you have no intention of killing. You’ll only make more problems for yourself. _Hell, if you play your cards right, someone else will holding the rifle for you when the time comes to pull the trigger_.)

Mitaka is not one to gloat, but you’re sure that you’ll be getting more phamplets after this.

And this, characteristic of Kylo—perpetually late and volatile— is when he shows up.

Dawson notices Kylo before you do. It’s not until Dawson has let go of his grasp on your collar that you realize what exactly has changed. Dawson backpedals, stumbling on his own feet as you look over your shoulder and see Kylo barreling toward you. Finally, you think, I didn’t need to buy as much time as I thought. You figured, at first, that Kylo will just chase him off. But no, Dawson tries to make a run for it but Kylo is too fast. You know that he can run 100 wind sprints in ten minutes but you’ve never contemplated what that means in real life. You know academically, professionally, what it means for someone to be as strong as he is—but you aren’t often confronted with it in this kind of way. Kylo runs past you and tackles guy to the ground in an empty parking space a couple dozen yards away. When you catch up to where they have fallen, you find Kylo crouching over Dawson as he scrambles and scrapes along the asphalt, trying in vain to get away. Kylo’s eyebrow is bloodied, red trailing down the side of his face and onto the collar of his ratty t shirt.

“Kylo!”

He doesn’t seem to hear you though. He hauls Dawson over onto his back and punches him clean across the jaw. Dawson’s body tenses up for a agonizing second and starts to go limp. Kylo moves to straddle his waist and winds up for another punch. If this was in the ring, the referee would have called the fight by now.

“Kylo!”

He still doesn’t hear you. The second punch sends Dawson’s head flopping the other way. If this was in the ring, Kylo would have gotten disqualified for unsportsmanlike conduct. Winner by disqualification, Mr. Dawson. But no one else is here but Dawson and you and Kylo and the sound of knuckles against flesh, the sound of teeth clacking together.

You rush over and grab Kylo’s arm before he can hit him again. You lean back on your heels and haul Kylo off of Dawson’s prone form. You pull him back until he’s sitting on the curb, looking up at you with a dazed look in his eye. Maybe he’s been concussed you think. But then again, maybe not. He doesn’t look lost or confused. When you crouch down to be on his level his gaze follows you carefully. You touch his eyebrow where it’s bleeding. It’s not a cut but a split; Dawson must have gotten one good punch off when you weren’t looking. He doesn’t flinch as you run your fingers over the place where his skin has broken apart. No. He’s not concussed. There’s this same stillness in him after a fight or after a flogging; in the moment before the referee announces the winner, in the moment before you tell him he did a good job—a coiled, adrenaline-soaked stillness. You can feel the chaotic thrum of his heart through his temple. The warmth of his skin is a comfort. He leans his head into the cradle of your hand, his eyes slipping closed for a moment. He huffs out a breath. “You bloody idiot,” you say softly, like you both are tucked in some place private and quiet as opposed to crouched between a beat up Toyota Corolla and an unconscious man. “I had the situation under control,” you say. You run your fingers through the fine hair at his temple. “But thank you. I knew you would come for me. I really owe you one.”

He touches his forehead and inspects the blood on his hand. “That man was going to gut you like a fucking fish, and you had it under control?”

“I’ve never been murdered before now have I?”

“What a good standard.”

“That’s not the issue. What if you got hurt?”

“That punk was never going to hurt me.”

“Maybe, but what if you hurt yourself. Break your elbow and you can kiss the Boyega fight good bye.” You’ve had a nice influx of bets on the fight since the card change. Boyega versus some up and coming fighter. People like what seems like a sure thing. But that’s not why you care. You can still hear the elation in his voice when he called you with the news, so earnest, so unguarded. You’re snapped back to reality when you hear sirens in the distance. “Wait, did you call the police?

“No, why?”

“Sirens, dumbass. I bet they’re coming for us.”

“Then lets leave.”

“We can’t fucking leave. There’s a guy bloody and unconscious on the ground who—you have to hope—is going to wake up soon and some Good Samaritan who called the police who probably saw this dumb ass and two other people get into a physical altercation. We run, we look guilty.”

  


Even though Ren is bloodied, and you’re scraped up, the presence of a semi-coconscious man on the pavement ‘warrants additional investigation, for precautionary reasons you see’. You accept this. Kylo does not.

They hand cuff Ren to a chair for quote, his own safety. You can hear him through the walls growling and howling. “You have no grounds to hold me!” He dripped blood on the floor all the way in. They’ve mopped up most of it but there are still small flecks hidden among the dots in the linoleum. Through the walls, Kylo yells, “You fuckers should be thanking me! That man was a menace! A grave threat to public safety!”

The form that you were given asks your relationship to the involved parties. The first was easy—you are the mugee to Dawson’s mugger. The second was a bit more complicated. You are Kylo Ren’s Acquaintance? Colleague? Friend? Fuck buddy? Are you even allowed to put fuck buddy on an legal document or would you have to put something a bit more tactful like paramour? You leave it blank and skip to the next question. What happened during incident (please be as specific as possible).

You can’t write what you want to: _A man, Dawson, tried to gut me over my mostly-legal gambling enterprise. These things happen from time to time. Nature of the business. A guy—who I’ve been fucking—decked him to, I assume, win my favor. I can never tell with Ren. He could have called the police or made a loud noise but no, he broke two of Dawson’s teeth and his orbital. I had to pull Ren off the guy. Maybe it wasn’t my favor that he was trying to win. Maybe this is truly the person he is. A beast barely contained. Rabid, like a dog. Blood and sweat and spit dripped onto Dawson’s face like a Rorschach test. Before Kylo knocked him out, he licked his lips, panicked. As he did that, he licked away drop after drop of Kylo’s blood. I kept thinking about the intimacy of that. Maybe that’s the person that Ren really is, one who forces intimacy upon others, even if he doesn’t intend to, even if they don’t want it. His blood got in the ridges of my fingertips as I pulled Ren away, as I touched the split in his skin. It got under my nails, behind my ears. Ren looked up at me like he had just woken up. I pressed my handkerchief against his split eyebrow. I called him a dolt, a bloody idiot. His skin was warm under my palm, a small relief. Before you showed up with the lights and the sirens, I had a different plan—because I always have a plan. I was going to drive us back to my apartment. I was going to patch up his face, I was going to frown at him, I was going to fuck him. I would mean to be gentle but end up rough. He would egg me on and I would let him. He would get blood on my sheets. Again. He would get blood on my sheets again. But instead of the blood being the product of a maniacal devotion to perfecting block/jab combos, it would be because of a devotion to me. I would call him dolt again, but into the hollow of his throat. I was going to revel in it, my rabid dog, my monstrous brute. Then, I was going to let the whole thing pass, let it be a story we hold against each other_ (‘you violent madman’, ‘you robot’) _. I was going to let it be. But instead of all that Mrs. Wen from the pawn shop across Grove saw the scuffle and called the cops in. So now I’m here, dried blood crusting under my nails—the little bit that the I couldn’t wash away with your shitty soap and cold metallic water. Ren’s voice echoes through the walls. He hollers for a phone call, for a glass a of water, for me. It cuts through the buzzy noise in the station, through the beating of my heart loud in my ears. He calls for me. And what am I? A handler. No. His handler? No. Lover sounds wrong somehow. But what are you supposed to call it when you love what someone can do to you?_

A call comes in before they even have a chance to decide if Ren is formally under arrest. You are both free to go, with their most humble apologies. Mr. Olivier Snoke, you assume. You’re proven right when Kylo gets a call in the parking lot. He’s silent for a long time, ear pressed to the receiver before he says “alright” and hangs up.

“Quick favor” he says, sliding his phone back into his pocket. “Could you give me a ride?”

The ride is out to the desert. The middle of nowhere. In your passenger’s seat, Kylo says, “He wants me back at the compound.”

You’ve been out there once or twice before. There were no other structures for what seemed like miles. You could hear the sand pour over itself as it shifted in the wind. You remember wondering how he got water service out in the midst of all that sand.

Kylo stretches his arms over his head, rubs at his wrists, his fingers kneading the flesh. You think of him handcuffed to the posts of your bed, kneeling on the floor, his arms stretched out behind him as he tries to bow toward the leather of your shoes. When you let him go, he made the same motion, like he just woke up.

Kylo says, “I know it’s a long drive, but I’ll make it worth your while.”

And you want to ask what exactly Snoke said that had Kylo, normally mouthy to a fault, silent. Was it a plea to his better nature? Was it a threat? Kylo doesn’t offer it and you realize, looking at joking grin plastered on his face, that it isn’t necessarily your place to know.

You say, “Does that work on the truckers?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?”

***

Lewd jokes aside, he falls asleep as you leave the Vegas city limits. You let him sleep. Being detained is exhausting.

You remember an argument you had with an ex about whether or not he should take a cab from the airport into the city. He said, it was only reasonable to pick someone up, it was the kind thing to do. You argued that, kindness aside, waiting around airport traffic is hardly worth your time. That was not the source of the breakup, but it certainly didn’t help matters as things went along.

(At the end, he had said you were too cagey, too secretive, that you put on a good front, but you don’t tell anyone anything really. He said that you’d never care about anyone more than you cared about First order. You told him that First Order was, for a long time, worth far, far more than your life. That it was reasonable to care about it more than other things. The rest you didn’t argue because he wasn’t exactly wrong.)

You try to think about what it should take to make this four-hour drive through the desert worth it. The math you do is inexact, but it always ends up with you back in Vegas at the office, while Kylo is in a rental car, driving himself out to the middle of nowhere. But you’re here and you have no intention of turning back.

You don’t need to consult your map—or Kylo, once he wakes up—more than once or twice even though the last time you were out at Snoke’s compound, was nearly a decade ago. You had borrowed money from him. Too much to be a simple loan between friends. It was an amount of money that could not be written off easily. He wanted formal updates on your financial progress since he had wired the money to you. He would not accept a phone call or an email or a handwritten letter. He wanted it to be in person and had no intention of coming to Las Vegas.

You took the drive out to the desert, getting lost along the winding roads and paths that lead you farther away from civilization as you knew it. What you saw first, cresting over a sand dune, was a massive wire mesh dome, surreally large. What you heard first was cawing, it bounced off the sand and echoed over and over itself. Cawing and screeching. It wasn’t until you got a little closer that you saw the birds themselves. Crows and ravens you are able recognize. A vulture or two as well. They sat on perches, circled low in the air. As you drove down a little hill, the rest of the house came into view, sprawling over itself. (You later heard a rumor that he registered this place as a bird sanctuary for tax reasons. But who knows.)

That meeting, all those years ago, went well enough. You said that First Order Booking was coming along nicely. You paid him back a portion of his money. He fed the birds while you spoke, his back turned to you. He put down the bucket, he had been scattering chicken gizzards from and turned to you. He told you thank you for taking the time to update me. He told you I expect a similar hard work and determination next time he comes calling. He held out his hand, still slick with bird guts and asked you to shake. When you hesitated, you swore you saw the corner of his mouth tweak up. “Surely, Armitage, you’d be willing to do something far more unsavory for something you need so dearly. To shake my hand should be no great burden.”

His hands were sticky with blood. You washed your hands twice in a guest bathroom before you left.

Now, when you drive up it looks mostly the same. The aviary is just as imposing as it was in your youth, as it was in your memories. Kylo is scrolling through his phone absentmindedly. You wonder how much time Kylo has spent here in the past. You realize that you don’t know much about his past in general. You think about what he said on the phone to you the day he locked himself out of his apartment, _I don’t know anyone anywhere really._

Even though you knew he would be here, it’s still a bit shocking to see Snoke here. He’s primarily been a disembodied voice over a phone for the past few years. Despite his lanky frailness, he still looks imposing standing in the doorway. He says, “Armitage. What a pleasant surprise” like he didn’t know you were brought into the police station with Kylo.

You put on your best professional face. Your best, I’m not fucking around with your protege face. “A pleasure to see you as well, sir.”

“Please, stay the night. It is late and the landscape is treacherous after dark.”

You say that you don’t want to impose, that you don’t have a toothbrush, that you don’t have anyone to feed your cat. Snoke waves you off. He insists he says. He would be insulted if you left.

So you stay.

Kylo has a room of his own, tucked on the other side of the house. You’re not sure what you were expecting, but nothing so pedestrian. Snoke even calls it Kylo’s room. You’re ‘invited’ to stay there while Snoke and Kylo discuss ‘business’.

It’s sparsely decorated, like he lives the life of a monk when he’s here. The idea of that makes you chuckle a little—maybe Kylo has lived a life of poverty, but of chastity, of renunciation absolutely not. You sprawl out on his bed and wait. When Kylo comes back to the room, a blanket of darkness has fallen over the landscape. You hate to admit that Snoke was right, driving home in this would have been next to impossible. Kylo smiles when he sees you, not one of those snarky, sneering ones he often gives you. No, it’s a small genuine thing. He leans in to kiss you, cupping his hand around the back of your neck, holding you in place.

In retrospect, you knew this was happening. That Snoke wasn’t calling Kylo back for a long weekend or something. “It’s just until the fight,” he says. “He says that a high-profile debut requires undivided attention and…”

“Your attention wasn’t undivided in the city,” you finish. You think of all the time he spent bounded and gagged in your apartment, how some of it could have been spent doing box jumps in the gym. “I can see how he would think that.”

You run the math in your head. The fight is in 60 or so days. Closer to 70 now that you count. Two months. Not forever certainly. But you realize that you haven’t gone more than a couple of days without seeing Kylo in about six months. Two months wasn’t a long time not that long ago.

He puts on an upbeat voice. “I will be back though.”

“I know.”

“And…” he pauses, drops his head down a tad. “I didn’t ask for this.”

You put your hand on his shoulder and he stops. “I know,” you say. And he tilts his head a little, like he’s inspecting you. You lean in and kiss him, softer, tenderer than you intended. But we can’t help the ways that we betray ourselves, you realize. His eyes are still pressed together when you pull back. You clear your throat, to preserve the moment. “Look, have fun rolling tires in the sand or whatever. I’ll see you when you get back.”

As you wind back through the desert, toward the lights of the strip, toward your business, toward your home, you keep checking back in your rearview mirror to catch glimpse after glimpse of the compound disappearing into the dunes.

And you figured that you wouldn’t actually see him for two months, that you’d be at the mercy of spotty cellphone reception and the occasional email for communication. But you get a call from Snoke a few days after you get back to Vegas. The request was simple. Antonio cannot make it to the city to pick up his slips, could you drop them off. You were about to offer up one of your underlings to make the drive or offer to mail them or fax them when Snoke cleared his throat. “I’m sure,” he said, “Kylo would be happy to see you as well.”

So, you took the afternoon off and made the drive.

Every week since Snoke has called with some increasingly outlandish request. Today, in the back of your car you have two 30-pound bags of Taste of the Wild dog food, one Alpine Stream one High Prairie, two 30-pound bags of Wellness Core cat food. You go out to a big box store out the outskirts of Henderson and fill the trunk. Janine the check-out girl says that you must have a full house. You say, “you have no idea.”

A couple of weeks ago, you drove a shipment of eighty live mice from a Las Vegas specialty store out. You counted them going in and coming out of the car. The order slip said _male and female as specified by Mr. Snoke._ When Snoke called you with the request he said, “They do like live food from time to time, Armitage, and I don’t want them wreaking to much havoc on the local ecosystem.” Snoke said, “you’re doing a massive service, you see there isn’t much mail out in these parts.” Snoke said, “For your trouble, please feel free to spend as much time as you’d like away from the hustle and bustle of the city.”

(Part of you considers slitting open one of the bags of cat food and pocketing some for Millicent. But Snoke isn’t the type of man you’d steal a pound of cat food from. Snoke isn’t the kind of man who would let anyone steal a pound of cat food from him. You know that all you do—and are doing and planning to do—is something that he has allowed. it’s something you don’t want to think about. But it will occasionally surface in your mind against your will when you sink your fingers into Kylo. That you aren’t getting away with anything. You realize that he calls you with these asinine requests as a way to keep Kylo placated as he’s sequestered in the desert.)

Your little Mazda sinks and skids in the sand drifts on the roads. Normally you would try to avoid stuff like this, if not for your own personal principles but because you have better things to do. But you do miss the way Kylo gasps when you fuck into him, the way his back goes pliant as you force his neck down, burying his face into the pillows. You don’t say any of this out loud, but even Mitaka knows something is up. When you say you’re going to be working from home for an afternoon he says, “have a good time, sir” like he knows. 

(When you were a child you had vowed to never be like your father—the austerity, the absurd desire for control. But as you grew older, you realized that in many circumstances, we do not choose who we become, we are shaped and molded, and we only realize who we are too late to change anything. You think of your father now, packing uncut heroin in coffins and ammunition crates, under m-rations; schlepping hundreds of thousands of miles for Mr. Olivier Snoke. Why? For a sliver of autonomy, a handful of control. And maybe, it turns out, that you are no different in the end. Not really. Only you move the makings of some smaller, more absurd habit.)

You make long drive out and stay the night and the next day. You sit on the veranda under the high mesh dome of the aviary while Kylo finishes sprinting in the sand. Snoke hands you a pail and asks you to scatter the contents on the ground below. Chicken and turkey spines. Beef ribs red and slick with meat. Eggs cracked to expose the golden yellow of their yolks. Peanuts, walnuts, pistachios, carefully shelled pound by pound. (Apparently it’s good training. Finger strength or something. Patience or what have you. Kylos hand always smell like a trail mix when he’s here). Organ meat, slick and fatty. Hearts you can tell. Livers too. You’re not sure what small animals they’re from.

You wonder how Snoke gets all this fresh meat out here but that’s a simple question really. There are probably many other people like you, all driving through the sand for their own preposterous reasons. Or at least, you think it’s preposterous as the squawking and cawing begins and the birds circle. But then, later, when Kylo’s skin is pressed against yours, you realize that he cannot call something so lovely preposterous.

Kylo’s fight, like most big fights, is on a Sunday. Kylo told you that he was slated to be driven back to Vegas by Antonio on that Sunday morning. When your doorbell rings on Friday evening, you don’t know who to expect. Mitaka, most reasonably, with last minute paperwork. You’re still processing when Kylo walks in past you, dropping a bag by your welcome mat and walking toward the kitchen.

Finally, you say, “I thought you were getting in two days from now.” When you turn he’s already disappeared into the kitchen, kicking up noise in his wake.

He comes back with a glass of water. “There was a change in plans.” You find that hard to believe. With the kind of man Snoke seems to be, with what he seems to have invested in this fight, you can’t imagine that he was willing to deviate from his plans. “Look,” he says, “I’d rather get back ahead of time. I told Snoke you’d be my chaperone.”

And now that the shock has worn off you realize you realize how quiet your house has been since he’s left. Millicent appears from your bedroom and rubs along his feet. He leans down and scratches her head.

You say, “Snoke believed that?”

—

After vetoing each other’s suggestions on what to do with your Saturday off, you settle on the Marina hotel’s pool. He wanted you to cane him. _lets blow off a little steam. Imagine it, I can wear your bruises to the ring._ No matter how appealing the idea seems to a dark part of your brain you know that it’s a phenomenally bad idea for a variety of reasons. And your counter suggestion was, perhaps, too conservative. Kylo responded with _If you think I’m gonna spend all day watching a foreign language documentary on the history of judo you are out of your fucking mind._ Fine, then.

You spend the afternoon under the echoey cover of dark, telling him about all the boring things your life had been reduced to with him so far away. Afterward, you take him back up to the Coral Suite. As he fucks you slowly even though you keep him to go faster, please god. You tell him how much you wanted this, how much you wanted him, the last time you were here. He doesn’t listen to you, pushing the air out of your lungs as you come, not caring if the other guests hear you.

—

You had no intentions of showing up. Despite your line of work, you hardly attend sporting events that you have over ten grand in active bets on. You figure, when the clock hits 0 or when the bell rings, a lot of people in the room are going to be out a lot of money and you’ll be the guy who they think has it. But here you are, in Kylo’s locker room. He left you a pass on your kitchen table before he left with Antonio at the crack of dawn this morning to do the weigh ins and the press conferences. Moral support you said to yourself. Just a moment of it and I’ll leave. He’ll hardly notice if I step out with all the fuss around him. But once you get to the trainer’s room can tell Kylo is nervous. He paces around the table of gear and medical tape they have set up in the middle of the room. The person checking his wrist tape has to scurry along beside him, asking _is this too tight_ twice before Kylo even acknowledges it. _Yes, yes, fine._

A producer pokes their head in the room and gives the five-minute call. He looks surprised to see you, like he hadn’t noticed you until this moment in the bustle of the room. And there are plenty of things you had thought of saying when you were on your way down here. Pep talks, strategy tips, something like that. But he’s heard enough of it you figure. You end up saying, “Don’t injure him too badly now” and Kylo cracks a smile, a genuine one.

“And here I was thinking you were going to wish me luck.”

You smile back, shake your head. “You don’t need me to wish you luck.”

“No,” he says, looking you in the eyes. “I don’t.”

“You don’t want me to wish you luck.”

“You seem like one of those people who doesn’t believe in luck”

“My father didn’t believe in luck. He believed in hard work and sweat equity and preparation.”

“And you?”

“I believe that if luck exists, it’s something that probably always works against you. So you have to work hard, put in sweat equity, be prepared, blah blah blah.” You put a hand on the space where his neck meets his shoulder. You can feel his pulse hammering against his skin. “But really, if there’s anyone in the world that could stop you from getting what you want, it’s not Boyega.”

You lean in and kiss him before the producers rush him out the door and toward the wings for his entrance, before the bell rings and the whole world knows his name. You lean in and kiss him once more, when is just yours. You can’t shake the feeling of his lips against yours as you emerge into the bright lights of the arena.

You aren’t sure what Boyega said that made everything break down so quickly. Which, you realize, isn’t really the point. But you keep running over the moment in your head. The ring announcer calls both fighters. In the red corner the champion, Finn Boyega. In the blue corner, the challenger Kylo Ren. The roar of the crowd. The referee calls both fighters to the middle of the ring to bump gloves and to talk about how he wants a good clean fight. But somewhere in that moment, Boyega leans in and says... something... 

Kylo pounced on him after that. The bell to signal the beginning of the match hadn’t rung and the referee—someone who can’t be more than 5’9”—was trying to get between them. You’ were up as soon as Kylo threw the first punch, moving toward the door to the cage before you realize what you’re doing. Both fighters’ managers and trainers and medics were trying to get in to help break up the fight. The arena is alive with whooping and hollering, screams and cheers. Distantly, unhelpfully, you remember the pool on the first day you met, you remember Kylo’s face as he said bloodthirsty people finance bloodsport. You remember Kylo as he knelt over your would-be-mugger, you remember the thudding sound of Kylo knocking him into unconsciousness. Now, under the searing hot lights, Boyega’s blood is on Kylo’s hands. It seems like he dazed Boyega with the sucker punch, and he hasn’t been able to mount a defense.

You’re able to slip into the ring along with the crew and the medics in the confusion.

“Kylo, what the fuck are you doing?!” You push forward and place a hand on the space where his neck and shoulder you meet. His skin is so running hot. The lights are so bright that it feels like you’re in some other dimension—like heaven but where your blood rungs cold. You say, “Kylo, come on. Please just stop this. You’ve worked so hard for this. Kylo! **Kylo**!”


	3. Chapter 3

You’ve only really loved three people in your life.

The second person was a boy named Travis Sabat. You and he attended Arkanis Prep together for six months. Boy, you say, because you were still a boy then too, in retrospect—barely 17 and thrilled with the modicum of normalcy, of freedom, that you had been allowed. This was during the final years of the Imperalis Defense Company. Somewhere in the Laotian jungle, your father and his associates were hatching a plan that would eventually get them killed by Snoke.

Travis Sabat had died in a skiing accident earlier that same year. (That’s the kind of money Brendol had access to toward the end, the kind where three of your schoolmates died in three separate skiing accidents, all in places like St. Moritz and Davos and Vale.) Shortly after Travis’s funeral you went to visit your father in a city near his base of operations —Viantiane if you remember correctly. Normally, such a visit direct from England would not be possible or prudent but Brendol was already in the area for business. He needed the use of the local airfield. You agreed to make the trip not only because of the sadness, but because you couldn’t bear being the center of your classmate’s attention. Even if you and he were hardly public, your relationship was well enough known that your grieving was forced into the public as well. South East Asia was far enough away, to get some peace. Shortly after that visit, you would be back at boarding school and Brendol would be dead as well.

In retrospect, again, Travis Sabat was not the best boy in the world; hardly the kindest, or the smartest, or the nicest. But he was yours in a way you had hardly had the chance to experience before, as a child made incredibly private by nature and nurture alike, who moved multiple times a year and could field strip a rifle blindfolded by your tenth birthday.

You never told Travis that you loved him, and you never would have most likely. You’re sure that your relationship with Travis wouldn’t have amounted to anything serious. You would have gotten different priorities, you both would have realized that you weren’t all that compatible, you would have drifted apart. But that doesn’t really matter at this point. For that sliver of time, he was yours, and for that you loved him.

***

There’s no reason why you have to leave Las Vegas. Technically, you have done nothing wrong. Your professional assessment of odds was not influenced at all by any personal relationship of any nature. You offered no information nor took any action that would call your ethics into question. You stand by that. Despite such a carefully worded statement released by First Order Industries, some people are still unhappy. _What’s to say that next time this Hux guy won’t throw in a towel to make his boy toy some money._ You are not upset about the accusations of impropriety. (Being as baseless as they are, you figure, eventually that situation will sort itself out.) What’s really bothering you is the pictures from the fight, or more accurately the fact that you appear in them. You’ve enjoyed near perfect anonymity in your life up to this point. Despite your shocking red hair and your wire thin frame, people who don’t routinely place five-digit bets would have very little reason to know who you are. You’ve been careful to make sure that, for all intents and purposes, First Order Industry has no face. You’ve been careful to make sure that Armitage Hux is, for all intents and purposes, nobody.

Now, the photos of you holding back Kylo from Boyega are plastered everywhere. From sports pages to social media to betting websites, you are Armitage Hux, Founder and Oddsmaker of First Order Booking (pictured right). People who normally wouldn’t call the office asking for you are asking for you specifically. Reporters sniff around, leave message after message with Mitaka. The call buttons on your phone light up. You considered unplugging it for a moment, then a call from Snoke came through. Mitaka poked his face into your office to alert you. You couldn’t imagine Snoke would appreciate your radio silence during this juncture. You picked up the phone.

So there is no reason for you to leave Las Vegas. But, over the phone, Snoke mentioned that Kylo might appreciate a change of scenery. Which you _could_ see being the case, if Kylo was at all plussed by the attention. He tells reporters to shove their cameras up their fucking asses. More come around the next day. Rinse and repeat.

The way Snoke phrased it made it sound like it was not a suggestion though, rather a command. Las Vegas is much too close to Snoke’s American base of operations for Kylo to safely kick up dust forever, you figure. Snoke suggests New York City. Despite the clusterfuck that was the Boyega fight, the WFO wants Kylo to fight again, another main event even. _A marquee event in New York of all places, how can you pass that up?_ Brash and brutal, Kylo has created quite a mark despite the disqualification loss. Of course, the fight is accepted. Snoke suggests that Kylo head out east before the fight, lie low, train, and prepare for the unqualified victory he was denied last time around. Kylo, aware that this was not actually a suggestion, says yes.

For him, there was a reason to leave Las Vegas, a very good one. But for you, you figure there’s no downside. Phasma could watch Millicent for the couple of weeks you’re gone. You can keep watch over the office from any place with an internet connection. A chance to get away would, hopefully, let people find some new minor outrage to latch onto while you were gone.

So, there is no reason to leave Las Vegas, but when an opportunity is presented to you, you felt it was prudent to take it.

Despite living in America for more than a decade, you have only been to New York only three times in your life. The first time, with your father when you were a child. This was before the inevitable dissolution of the Imperalis Defense Company. Brendol Hux had business meetings to conduct. You spent most of the days in the hotel room reading books you pilfered from the lobby—mysteries mostly, thrillers and detective novels. You spent the evening in the trattoria adjacent the hotel. By the end of the week, the waitstaff dubbed you little orphan Andy. You hated it fiercely but never corrected anyone.

The second time, in boarding school, somewhere in the middle of a long period of poorly hidden debauchery. You went with a school group. You got hammered each night and slogged through museums each day. At the end, you had to write a 500-word essay about the culture of New York City. You wrote two hundred about the etiquette of puking on public transit before you deleted it and bullshit something about the lions in front of the public library instead. You got an A, stopped drinking gin, and moved on with your life.

And the third, this, now. With Kylo Ren, a hothead with fists that could be classified as deadly weapons. With business of your own.

You knew that Snoke wouldn’t have you staying on Fifth Ave, but you didn’t expect something so out of the way. The place that he arranged is in a part of the city that is mostly warehouses—current and converted. The cab snakes through side street after side street to get you there. The air filtering through the sliver of open window is chilly. You haven’t worn anything heavier than a windbreaker in years.

Snoke picked it, you figure, because it is near the converted warehouse that Kylo is to spend the next eight or so weeks sweating and bleeding in all hours of the day or night. It’s on the smaller side and furnished like a showroom. You think you’re the first people to actually stay in the place. There’s still plastic film on the refrigerator and TV, there’s no silverware in the drawers.

You realize, as you unpack your suitcase into the closets in the bedroom, that you’ve never actually lived with Kylo. Not effectively, a least. Yes, he’s stayed he the night at your apartment. He had a toothbrush your medicine cabinet. But now, under such odd auspices, you realize that you are now in a space that is just as much his as it is yours. You have never lived with a significant other before.

You want to ask if Kylo knows what this means—for you, for the both of you, for your relationship in general—but the seems unconcerned. He’s sprawled on the bed, long limbs splayed out like a starfish. His shirt is riding up, exposing a slice of his abdomen, muscular and dusted with hair. He says, “Help me christen this bed taxman.”

We all work through our existential crises in our own way, you figure.

“I would love to,” you reply.

Most fighters run camps much longer than two months but the WFO didn’t want to move the date they already had. The booking agent said, _it’s not like you fought a whole match last time, right? you just have to stay in shape, not get in shape_ like it was a simple thing. Kylo is daunted by the prospect. He sets to training with a single-minded determination that surprises you. You had only seen him on evening and weekends, days off. Now that there is no distance, you’re able to catch glimpses of the fanatical dedication that has made him as good as he is.

In the meantime, you set to scrounging around the city, trying to find things that are inexplicably missing from the apartment. Detergent, lightbulbs, silverware. You probably could order all this stuff online, but you figured you might as well explore the neighborhood with the free time you have.

You had chosen Las Vegas as your place to live all those not because it was the best option in the whole world, but because it was the one that was the most feasible at the time. It was slightly easier to be just barely an adult and broke there. But if you had had infinite resources and no worries you might have chosen some place like New York—someplace that is alive with the thrum of people, someplace where you could easily disappear.

You assumed Kylo grew up on the east coast, if not in or around New York then some other city. (He’s always been oddly resistant to driving and doesn’t seem to have the best idea of how his hazard lights work). But you’ve never asked explicitly. But it wouldn’t surprise you if he was because, about New York, Kylo is interestingly hostile. He asks who’d want to pay this much money to live in a rat trap.

Regardless, you settle into a little routine. You fall asleep to the sound of Kylo’s steady breathing. You get woken up by the screech of his alarm, hellishly early so he can start training at some ungodly hour. You shower while he runs around the neighborhood, rain or shine. You get dressed in your ironed and tailored button-down shirts and suit pants even though you work from the kitchen table. You field calls and answer emails and rerun odd calculations while Kylo does push-ups with weights strapped to his back or whatever he does. Snoke has connections out here too, so there’s coach who instructs him on the finer points of stand-up defense, of take down offense, of transitioning footwork. Occasionally, he comes back bruised, bloodied. You administer the odd stitch or two with plain dental floss. _The British Boy Scouts are more hardcore than I thought._ Kylo eats like a starving man. On the fridge, he’s taped a meal schedule. He’s supposed to eat every two hours. He eats enough cod to empty the ocean. You steam enough boneless skinless chicken breasts to last you a whole year. At the end of the day, he sits on the floor while you massage his shoulders. The tv drones on—game shows generally. _What is the Meiji Restoration? Who are The Bee Gees? I’ll take Love for 600, Alex._ Kylo gripes about how everything is so expensive here, about how he wants to eat something other than steamed broccoli. He tips his head back and asks for dessert with a lascivious eyebrow waggle. You don’t want to honor something so juvenile with a laugh, but you can’t help it. You kiss him regardless. On Sundays, when he’s permitted a day of rest and you have a reasonable excuse to not be near your phone for a little while, you paddle him just hard enough to bruise but not so hard that he won’t be able to do planks later on. 

Mitaka emails you periodically, updating you about the comings and goings from the office. Occasionally, he asks when you’re planning on coming back to Las Vegas. You tell him soon. You tell him eventually. You tell him not to worry about it.

It’s only a few months, you get here, a small slice of your life—to play regular relationship—but you savor each day of it that you can.

The press conference leading up to the fight is packed with reporters. Three weeks out and they’re eager to see the person who floored Boyega before the bell. They’re dying to see the beast barely contained. Its standing room only, the room loud with the chatter of dozens of people.

You’ve been listed as Kylo’s liaison with the venue, so they give you a badge and a seat off to the side of the stage, behind the curtain— _in case you need to speak with your client_. You know Snoke not so subtly invited you out to New York not just for Kylo’s personal benefit, but for his professional benefit as well. Over the phone, Snoke said that you only needed to keep an eye on him, make sure he shows up to places on time and doesn’t make too much of a mess. _I imagine you’ll already be doing that, Armitage, so I see no harm in asking formally._ You wanted to say that you don’t work miracles but said sure. You said, why not. You said, it’s only reasonable in exchange for a free lodging and a plane ticket. It could be worse. As most of the past five weeks have been spent training, you’ve only needed to make sure that he doesn’t catastrophically injure himself. This is the first real thing that requires you go anywhere. You’re sipping mediocre coffee in a hotel convention room while reporters asking Kylo and the other fighter, Poe Dameron, question after banal question. _How has training camp been? Are you looking forward to the match up? Can you share any of your strategy?_

Before you had left, you had told Kylo that if he was good, you’d reward him. That you’d make the tedium of such a process more than worth his while. Now, Kylo nods along with the questions, he’s polite. Perhaps that’s what’s happening here. Snoke didn’t send you to be the manager, he sent you to be the reward.

Banal question after banal question until some reporter in the way back asks Kylo, “What do your parents have to say about you being here?”

Kylo’s eyes narrow instantly. He says, “fuck you, next question” before reporter is done talking. A murmur ripples across the room.

Undeterred, the reporter continues, “I only ask because Senator Leia Organa worked tirelessly to prevent MMA from being allowed in New York State. It must have been a bittersweet moment for her son to come home under such an occasion.” For a moment, the room falls silent, then it erupts into a cacophony of sound: voices over voices, flashbulbs over flashbulbs. You look to the stage and see Kylo standing, leaning on the flimsy wooden table they have set up in front of him. He has his eyes trained on the reporter, nestled back in the jostling sea of faces. Kylo is audible without a microphone. _Stop hiding back there you coward. Come here and face me if you want to real talk, let’s real talk. Come up here you motherfucking…._

You never asked what got Kylo so upset at the Finn fight. The moment to ask had passed by, filled with other more pressing concerns like how to make sure Finn’s team wouldn’t press assault charges and how to make sure that Kylo wouldn’t be suspended from the WFO permanently. Once everything had gotten itself sorted out, you were more concerned with getting the fuck out of dodge then investigating what exactly caused the whole thing in the first place. Which, in retrospect, kind of was your fault. If you had asked, you would have been able to see this coming.

Once security steps in to keep Kylo on the stage and out of the pit of reporters. You step in to stop a not great situation from getting decidedly worse. You grab the microphone from where it’s been abandoned and ou tell the crowd, “Thank you for your questions. That’s all the time we have for today.” You pull Kylo’s arm until you’ve dragged him behind the curtain, out the door, and into a cab. So much for your time in New York being a time to let the whole you and Kylo thing blow over. The phone Snoke gave you your work as ‘Kylo’s liaison’ which has sat quiet the previous few weeks you’ve been here immediately starts ringing. You press the button to ignore the call and it lights up again. The number was probably listed on some form back at the venue. You flick it to silent and let it ring.

Kylo has his head cradled in his hands, his shoulders hunched over on himself.

The two of you rock from side to side as the car weaves between traffic.

The first time you had heard of Kylo Ren, it turns out, was the first time you heard of Ben Organa Solo. It was a part of piece of gossip that was circulating around when you not long after moved to America. At the late-night laundromat near your first apartment, the owners would keep the radio playing. For what felt like weeks, all that tinny radio played was the unfolding saga of the acrimonious divorce between racing driver Han Solo and political up and comer Leia Organa. Who got the house in the Hamptons? Who was cheating on who? Who has an offshore account where? You separated your whites from your colors as they talked about custody of their only son, the sixteen-year-old Ben Organa Solo.

You google it to make sure you’re remembering right. Yes, a Ben Organa Solo, rarely photographed but he definitely existed. Both parent’s Wikipedia pages don’t mention anything about him after: _placed in temporary custody with uncle Luke Skywalker pending the resolution of parental custody case._ You think of what Kylo told you about his past. That his parents couldn’t or wouldn’t or didn’t stop him from training with Snoke. That they no longer had any say in the matter when such a decision was being made

You look over and Kylo—Ben? No Kylo, still Kylo— and he’s still curled in on himself. Online, you see a picture of when he was a child with a big shaggy Irish Wolfhound in the middle of some sprawling field of green grass. You can barely tell it’s the same person who you met in Vegas, blood thirsty and shaped by the desert sand. 

***

The first person you ever loved was Rae Sloane. Your mother died when you were too young to remember her much. Your living grandparents were old enough to require more care themselves than they could reasonably provide you. Your father was your father.

Rae was not parental, let alone motherly. Her job in the Imperialis organization was not to watch you, but she did from time to time. She taught you appropriate trigger discipline and how to hide most effectively in a series of structures from cabinets to suitcases. But care is demonstrated in any number of unusual ways. And maybe—as a child, taken from the relative quiet of an English exurb and dropped into a series of places with landmine warnings posted in six different languages—you would have loved anyone who took the time to care about you.

If you think about it academically, you know that all sorts of animals are willing to imprint on broom sticks and rolls of paper towels and lawn ornaments, not because they’re reasonable caregivers but because they were at the right place at the right time.

But non-academically, you think the last time you saw her—before you got on the plane to go back to boarding school, before the inevitable dissolution of Imperialis—she reached up to smooth down your hair. You had to stoop a little bit so she could reach. You had gotten tall so fast she said. It was such a pedestrian thing to say, so normal, that it stood out among the rhythmic whooping of helicopter rotors and the smell of jet fuel. It was a small thing, but you loved that someone had noticed.

***

Back at the apartment you now share, Kylo sits on the edge of the bed. “Hux? Armitage.” It’s odd to hear your first name out of his mouth. “Are you mad at me?” The phone Snoke gave you for things pertaining to Kylo is on still silent, ringing itself through a full battery. There is nothing productive you can do now. You shake your head. You’re actually not mad. “Come on, taxman.” He reaches out to you, callous hand extending and then he stops just before he reaches your elbow. “Look. I still want to do this.”

_This_ , the submissiveness, for Kylo, you’ve figured, is about pushing his himself to his limits, past his limits, as far as he can go. There's a video of him fighting in some no name gym years ago. In it, he’s painfully young with his hair cropped awkward around his ears. In the 4th round he gets his shoulder pulled out of his socket. The hollow divot where his joint should be is visible on the tape. The ref calls the fight, but Kylo pushes his shoulder back in the socket himself. Before the trainer could come in the cage, before the ref could step in, he hauled his arm back in place with a gleam in his eyes. He does not back down from anything.

This about feeling the adrenaline spike as he gets one more slap, one more stripe, one more second without breath, one more moment he can hold out before he begs. However much of this is about chasing an orgasm, there’s an equal amount of it that is just recklessness. That however much of this is about letting go, there’s as big a part that wants to push—to be pushed—harder, faster, rougher than he was before.

And, as an odds maker, you’re in the business of self control. Or more accurately you’re in the business of lack of self control. Granny Anderson who makes one bet a year on the Kentucky derby isn’t who keeps First Order Booking in business. It’s people who would bet their kidneys if you had a connect in the organ brokerage business and a surgeon to remove them. It’s people with as little self-control as regard for their future wellbeing. It’s a bit of a gross fact: that, sometimes, you’re player and witness to the worst impulses in people. That you’re the person who sells shovels for people to reach rock bottom the most efficiently. That you don’t help people get better, you help them get worse. But it doesn’t bother you. It shouldn’t. It can’t. Not anymore. (That’s the link between your and his father’s businesses, you realized years ago: subsidizing the chase of vice, of personal ruin.)

And you remember what Snoke said to you back in the desert compound as you threw chicken bones to his roost of unruly birds, that he likes your influence on Kylo. That you keep him vicious, that you keep him hungry.

At the press conference today Kylo was on the stage, telling the reporter to shove his microphone up his ass, telling him to get up here and square up if he had shit to say, telling him that he’d eviscerate him. _If you want to see me tear someone apart, let go of me so you can get some tape of me turning this motherfucker’s face into ground beef._

You figured that all of it is part of the same thing. That whatever makes Kylo break bones and push boundaries is also the thing that makes him beg to be whipped. And maybe this makes you a bad person, a petty person, a selfish person, but you can’t be mad at what makes him give himself so wholly, so fully, so recklessly, so totally over to you. There is nothing he doesn’t offer, there is nothing you can’t have. And you’re a sucker, you realize. And you always have been.

But now, barely two hours and a million phone calls he didn’t have to field later, he’s sitting on the bed you share. He looks at you questioningly. You should talk about this. Or yell at him. Or try to do damage control. But it’s been a long day. And you aren’t a perfect man. You aren’t someone who makes people better. You’re someone who empowers them to be the shitty people they can’t help but be. You’re a sucker, through and through.

“Fine,” you say. “Get naked and lie on the bed.”

A smile spreads across his face. Now that you’re in a scene he knows what to do, what role to play, what ground he stands on. “Man, I figured you’d give me something more elaborate than that. Teach me a lesson. Or are you running out of ideas?”

You say, “Look, spare me all of that. Bed. Now.”

You have a hard time reading the look he gives you—not nervous because he’s not the type to get nervous over something like this. Hesitant, maybe. He shucks off his clothes and lies back on the bed. He crosses his hands over his stomach like he’s trying to appear nonchalant. He watches you carefully as you undo your tie, hanging it over the back of the chair. As you take off your cuff links, Kylo clears his throat, an awkward little sound.

You sit on the edge of the bed and place your hand on his hip. You can feel the tension coiled tight under his skin. It’s been a long day for him too, you realize. You figured that he careened through life without a care for the destruction he left in his wake, that the person who punches out strangers on the sidewalk and blows paper view matches over some trash talk isn’t someone who worries about consequences. But he looks up at you, worried, perhaps. You still can’t quite place the look, but it’s not the brash confidence that he normally puts on.

Maybe you shouldn’t do this, you think. Maybe you should call it off and talk everything through—the match, the press conference, the reporters, the photographers, all of it. But, if you know Kylo like you think you know him, he wouldn’t want that. He’d hate you more for babying him than for anything else you could do. Still…

“Are you doing this for me?” you ask.

A look of confusion washes over his face. “Fuck no, taxman. I’m not getting any younger here. Get on with it.”

“Fine then. Put your hands by the headboard.”

You fish around in the bedside table for a set of cuffs, the leather supple against your fingertips as you buckle Kylo’s wrists to the slats. You had an older set before but bought these special a couple of months into your arrangement with Kylo.

‘This is pretty tame, right?” Kylo says as you double check that the cuffs aren’t too tight. He cranes his neck up to look the straps connecting him to the headboard. “Wait, have you really run out of ideas?” You don’t honor him with a response. Instead, you move to straddle his chest. He looks up at you and smirks. “What you want to feel bigger than me for a change?”

“I don’t need to stoop to such tactics to be a bigger person, Kylo.”

You undo your slacks, pulling your cock out so it bobs in front of his face. He cranes his head forward a bit even though the angle is awkward. You can feel his breath ghosting over you. You grab the tangle of hair at the back of his head and hold him in place. You push your cock past his slack lips, holding his head steady while you fuck into the close heat of mouth. His eyes slip closed as he relaxes his throat. You have to admit this is a bit indulgent. You love the warm, slick feeling of his mouth. You love the way he goes pliant as you use him.

The room is quiet save the wet sound of his mouth as you thrust into him. The rattle of one of the cuff’s buckles breaks the relative silence. He’s flexed his arm against the restraint even though his eyes are still closed. You press a thumb into the hinge of his jaw, and he opens a bit wider without any further prompting. The nervous energy beneath his skin only gets more pronounced as your hips start to speed up, as you start to feel your balls tighten. You come, not stopping so he can swallow. You let your come fill his mouth and continue to fuck through it. He moans beneath you; you can feel it against your thighs. you crawl off of him and button yourself back up.

  


When you turn back toward him, his eyes are trained on you a bit glassy, but sharp. His dick is hard, a deep red and wet at the tip.

“Did you like that?” You ask.

“Yeah,” he says, dreamily. 

“That’s good.” You place hand on his hip. You can feel him tense up under your palm for a moment. His cock leaks more precum onto his belly. “What do you think I had planned for today?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You didn’t even have a guess?”

He shakes his head.

“Well then. What you do you want to have happen now.” You move your thumb back and forth along the crease of his hip, his eyes flutter closed. “And I mean really, there’s no right answer.”

“I want to come.”

“Come again, Kylo.”

He clears his throat and says it again, “I want to come.”

“I’m sorry, I couldn’t quite catch that.”

“I want to come sir,” he says, loud enough that the words feel like they echo around the huddled walls of the room.

“There we go. You know those press conferences, so loud. I swear I still got a buzz in my brain.” “How about we do that. It’s been a long day. You must be tired.”

Before he has a chance to say anything, you slide your hand to wrap around his cock. He groans, flexing his hips to fuck into the tight grip of your fingers. It doesn’t take long before his hips start to stutter, before he flexes against the hold of the cuffs until the headboard. He makes a bitten off groan as he comes, covering your hands and his own belly with his release. You keep your hand moving, milking him through until he’s spent.

“I don’t think you needed to cuff me for this, taxman.” He chuckles a bit, shakes his wrists so the cuffs jangles. “This is like junior high shit. Nice, I mean but…” he shakes his wrists again. “Junior high.”

“Leaving aside whatever debauched rich kid junior high you went to.” He shoots you a dirty look and you smirk. “Who said this was it? You know I’m a person who cares about technicalities right. What did you call me back when we first met?”

“An anal-retentive motherfucker.”

“Right. I have a reputation to live up to. And you said that you wanted to come. Not once, not twice, but three times. So, I’m going to hold you to that. So, you’re saying here until you tap out or until you come two more times.” “That’s what you wanted right.”

—

Kylo tips his head back as your mouth slides over his cock. He lets out a shaky breath, oversensitive so soon after the first orgasm. You figured it take longer for him to get hard again, but soon he is pressing his hips up, to get more of himself into your mouth. You can feel the chaotic thrum of his heart against your tongue as you suck him deeper. “Fuck,” he mutters. When you look up he’s worrying his lower lip between his teeth.

You pull off, keeping suction along the shaft and head as you do. His head tips back, exposing the column of his throat.

“I want to hear you.” Kylo looks down at you, eyes narrowed. “I want to hear what you have to say.”

You maneuver his thighs so his knees are up by his chest, so he’s open and exposed to you. He whines when you lick along his puckered entrance, a high and needy sounds. They melt into breathy moans, into moans of your name, into bitten off curses. He begs. _Please_ , he says. _Fuck please put your fingers in me. please_. _Fuck, I want you to fill me up please, sir._ Seeing him, hearing him this open, this exposed, this shameless goes straight to your dick. You press your clothed erection into the mattress, to distract just a little bit. You want to maintain at least the image of control for a while.

Without his hands, all the support he has to stay in this position your hand pressed into the back of his thigh, folding him up. After a few minutes, his thighs and abs, his back starts to tremble. You unfold him so you can move back to his cock, to take him inch by inch, sucking as you go. As you work your way down, you slide a finger, two fingers into his hole. Once you curl your fingers, rubbing against his prostate. _Fuck, fuck, fuck._ Coming, his cock throbs in your mouth.

You pull off his dick, swallowing. His hair, extra shaggy from not being cut since you were in Vegas, is stuck to the west on his forehead and neck. You keep offering, but he shoos you away. He says he’ll cut it before the fight, once he’s made it through the fight camp. You tuck the stray hairs behind his ears.

He breathes like he had just come back from running with the weighted vests and anklets and wristlets. You’re always amazed at the technology they have to push the human body, but then realize, belatedly, that you have a trunk full of trinkets designed to do the same.

Kylo says, “Damn, I’m young but I don’t know if I’m this young.”

“You’re an athlete,” you say, standing and stretching your legs. “You get paid to be in top physical condition.”

“I’m a fighter. I get paid to break my nose and not go down.”

\---

You bring a glass of water with a straw. He shakes his head. “What a shame. You’re you going soft on me,” he crows with the confidence of someone who isn’t currently tied down. You glare until he cranes his neck so he can drink.

“I can imagine the headlines now. _Kylo Ren, bloodthirsty cretin and long-lost son of Senator Leia Organa and Han Solo, rushed to hospital into the middle of kinky sex games._ I really don’t want to deal with the fallout from that.”

“I’ve said it before, I can take anything you throw at me”

“How do your arms feel?”

“I thought you said I’m not—”

“I’m being serious here. I have no interest in actually injuring you.” You can see the snarky comment on his face before he has a chance to say it. You cut him off. “Just are you okay? Any pain, any stiffness?”

“I’m fine Hux. I’m serious I’m fine. I want this. Keep going.”

—

So, one and two, you knew, would be pretty easy all things considered. You can get two orgasms out of an encounter without much issue if you try. Three will probably take a bit more effort. But you’re nothing if not willing to try.

You rifle around in the trunk in the closet, goodies you had shipped from Las Vegas to New York to avoid the potential mortification of having it hand searched in JFK. Kylo calls out to you from the bed— _what are you getting? Hey answer me_. He’s caught enough breath to be petulant again. You pull out a vibrating plug and lubricant, taking your sweet time to put everything away. The click of the chains against the headboards is clear even from this far away. You’ve never met your neighbors that share this wall with you, but you know they’re there. You hear them move through their apartment—turning on and off faucets, listening to Weather on the 1s, buzzing in people on the intercom—so you know they must hear Kylo and you carry on into the night. Or maybe, you live next door to a ghost without the presence of mind to let go of the petty trappings of the past, stuck aping regular life at a loss for what else to do. Regardless, you wonder what they think of you two.

You place the plug on the nightstand well in view so Kylo can wonder as you take off the rest of your clothes. You take your time, matching hems to hems, smoothing out wrinkles and creases. Once you’re naked you get back onto the bed, clicking open the lube and drizzling some on your fingers.

“Are you ready?” You ask.

“God yes.” he says. “Are you trying to leave me here until I’m a senior citizen?”

“Until you’re a halfway reasonable person, but it might end up taking that long.”

Your first finger slides in easily, then a second. You splay the fingers of your other hand into the soft flesh of his inner thigh, holding his legs open. the tension from earlier is al but gone, he shifts his hips along with your fingers. you keep working your fingers into him, slowly stretching and massaging as you go. He watches you, watches your arm move, with hooded eyes. His cock begins to fill without you touching it. He’s barely half hard but it feels like you’ve been on the edge forever, listening to the uneven huffs of breath and seeing his taut muscles stretch and struggle against confinement. You pull your fingers out, crawling over his body to grab the plug from the nightstand.

“Are you going to put it in me, taxman?” His voice sounds thick when he speaks. 

You fumble with the controls on the base until it springs to life in your hand. You leave it by his hip for now, the buzzing cutting the quietness of the room. “Eventually,” you say, settling back between his thighs.

There’s barely any resistance when you push into him. It’s all velvet heat and tightness around your cock as you sink in, inch by inch, and revel in the feeling of him giving way to you. Once you’re all the way in, you reach for the plug and press the tip to the space behind his balls. It’s a bit of an awkward position. You’d love to take the opportunity to loom over him, press kisses against his jaw and suck marks into his throat, nip and his ears and shoulders. But you have to stay further back on your heels. At least from this position you can take in the way he presses his head back, the way he grips the chains of cuffs with his knuckles going white from the force, the way his Adam’s apple bobs around an unbidden moan, the way his thighs quiver as you fuck into him. The stimulation of his prostate on both sides gets him fully hard soon, cock bobbing between you, leaving a sticky smears of precum on his belly. You fuck him slowly, deeply, reveling in the way his body tenses around you. You feel yourself getting close. You put the vibrator to the side so you can lean forward and kiss him, feel his breath against your mouth as you come.

You pull out and grab the vibrator again, pressing it in his hole, still slick with your come. And there’s a small part, a sick part, a possessive part, that loves to see your own come get pushed back into Kylo. You turn up the vibration and Kylo’s moans ratchet up in kind. You take him back into your mouth and slide down until your nose is pressed up against his pelvis. Kylo tenses up, from his fingers to his toes. He bites his lip hard enough to bring up beads of blood.

You undo the cuffs. Kylo stretches his arms lazily. You roll him over and start massaging his arms from shoulders to wrists. You ask him if his arms feel okay, if his back feels and he says “great, great. I feel great” you can hear the laugh on the edge of his voice. He’s loopy. By the time you come back from the kitchen with another glass of water he’s dozing. You consider waking him up. You know you won’t be able to sleep peacefully until you’ve rundown the whole post scene check list. But he looks peaceful, so content. You wake him up after he’s slept for a half an hour or so and herd him into the shower.

Afterward, Kylo sits on the edge of the bed, letting a damp spot form where his body meets the fabric. He nervously picks at the edge of the towel around his waist. “So…”

You’ve put a dent in the emails, answering no comment to each one and blocking the address once you’ve sent it. “So, what?”

He sighs, looks you in the eyes. “I take it you didn’t know before.”

You search his face, trying to find a hint of his mother’s eyes, his father’s chin. You can’t, not really. “No,” you say. “I mean I knew Kylo was a fake name. But I figured you had changed it to be more intimidating, not that you had it changed _from_ something.”

Which is true. You’ve met a lot of people with absurd names in your time in the sports betting industry. Eventually, you have to accept that someone’s legal name is going to be Quatro Quatro and just move past it.

He waits a beat, then asks, “Are you upset that I didn’t tell you?”

“Do you know what my father did for a living.”

Kylo looks confused. “He worked for Snoke. _I never said my father was a good man_ , right?”

“Yeah. But do you know what he did exactly?” Kylo shakes his head. “My father ran a paramilitary group. Originally they did stuff like provide security for executives when traveling through ‘politically unstable areas’. It was through one of those jobs that he met Snoke. From then on, my father’s paramilitary group used their equipment and connections to facilitate the smooth operation of a portion Snoke’s business. I mean it was a good idea on Snoke’s part. How many other people come with their own planes, their own guns and tactical training, and enough international ties to get in and out of a variety of countries without that much of a hassle.

“After my mother died, I spent the majority of my time with my father while he was on assignment. He didn’t want such a valuable bargaining chip hanging around a random town in Kent with an au pair. Once I was a bit older, I was able to convince him to send me to boarding school, but that’s a different story. Anyway, when I was seventeen, warrants were issued for my father and the rest of the Imperialis Defense company. Drug smuggling, racketeering, murder. They weren’t bogus charges, but the prosecutors were clearly hoping for someone to testify to make everything fit together. Some of the higher members of Imperialis—my father mostly, but others as well—saw this as a chance to bargain with Snoke. They had been working tirelessly for years, they thought, and not getting their fair share of the profits. They came up with a plan: demand a larger cut of the smuggling operation’s profits or they talk and take Snoke down with them. I was, luckily enough, at boarding school when the majority of Imperialis was gunned down.

“Eventually, after the prosecutors had gotten through all of the survivors, I was brought in for questioning. They knew I had spent considerable time with my father in the areas where the smuggling was done. They figured I had seen something. They offered me protection in exchange for any information—a name, a location, anything. Eventually I was able to convince them that I knew nothing. That I was an innocent bystander, a kid spending horrible summer vacations in Laos while the other kids were in Ibiza; that I was a child of endless wealth with no understanding of how it was produced. I was able to go free. With the others dead or unwilling to talk for fear of the same, the case was shelved. Since the exact methods and contacts of the operation were never divulged, with some small adjustments the operation was able to continue. I, in my own way, was able to help salvage Snoke’s East Asian drug smuggling network.

“The little evidence they were able to collect later was used to mount a civil suit against what remained of Imperalis and all of the assets that could be accounted for were liquidated to settle. My father had no assets that were not tied up with Imperialis and thus, I got nothing.

“Later, I turned up in the desert looking for a fresh start. I had exhausted all of the regular places to get money which are few and far between for someone barely old enough to drive legally. So, I started asking my father’s old connections, ones that were still alive. Eventually Snoke found out. And Snoke knew that I knew—about the nature of the assignments, the methods of movement, the finances, the names and faces of various portions of the operation. My father told me so I would be able to make the same demand he so recklessly did. If I hadn’t been back at school that day, I would have been executed alongside them. Seventeen or no, I was still a liability. Perhaps more so because what seventeen-year-old wants to go to jail for something they technically didn’t do.

“Eventually, stupidly, I met with Snoke. And he said he was impressed, that when I was safely in the protection of the Swiss guard, far from his grasp, I could have talked and assured myself amnesty. He was impressed that I agreed to show my face at all. He was impressed that I chose the harder path; the bloody path, he called it. One cannot be placed upon it, he said, one finds it on their own and walks it regardless of all else. For that, he lent financial and social capital to a hopeless young person venturing into the business world.

“I say all that to say, I know what it means to keep a secret. I don’t blame you for keeping it.”

You had never meant to tell him this story either, not because it was too private but because no matter how big a part of your life it is, it always feels irrelevant somehow. You would take it to your grave if you had the chance. But it felt like you needed to tell him this now, if only to be on even ground again.

After a long moment, Kylo says, “The bloody path. Snoke said I walked it as well. When I asked why he would bother to train someone like me, why he would bother to train me, he said that I walked the bloody path and that could not be taught.”

Perhaps that’s why Snoke has sent you here at all, so Kylo can sharpen himself against the ruthless sliver you nurture deep in your heart.

You don’t have to check the internet the next morning to know that people have drawn the connection between you and Kylo. Mitaka’s emails take on a different tone. The panic is thinly veiled now. _Sir, do you have a desired message to be sent out on behalf of First Order Booking? Sir, I’m taking the initiative to remove our phone number and address from our contact form. Sir, when are you coming back to Las Vegas?—there are reasonably priced flights leaving as early as Tuesday._

You type out _after the fight_ and then delete it. You don’t consider yourself a pessimist, but you pause. You don’t think something like this will tank your business. But surely it will change it. There’s no doubt about that. Even though you have asserted that your odds have not and will not be changed by any personal relationship of any nature, it’s become harder to argue that this is _just_ a personal relationship.

You draft a response for the website and for the press much like and send it along. You tell Mitaka that it’s fine to remove the contact information from the website. You leave that last question unanswered.

Kylo trains like usual. Or as usual as can be. He refuses to run outdoors. If anyone was going to recognize him in the neighborhood they already would have, you figure. But that doesn’t convince him.

“I was lucky that I wasn’t photographed a lot as a kid. And that I legally changed my name, put on like eighty pounds of muscle, and grew around eight inches since the last time anyone saw me as Ben Solo.” He sighs. “I mean, I knew I’d always get found out eventually, I just kept hoping it’d be when I was around 95 years old. Now that people know there’s no telling what’s going to happen.”

He runs inside, on a treadmill in the converted warehouse. You want to tell him that he’s being absurd, but steadily you know that it’s not the case.

After the Finn fight, people’s interest in you pretty much only extended as far as the city limits. You figured that outrunning the story was a matter of distance and time if nothing else. You could run farther and for longer than some small-scale scandal, you figured and packed up to New York.

It doesn’t take long for this to morph into a whole different monster. Real news organizations start asking not just about the long-lost Ben Organa Solo, finally found busting faces on the West coast, they start asking about you too—Handler? Friend? Associate? The New York Post assumes that he’s involved in some sort of fight fixing scheme. _Why else would he be spending time with a bookie of all people_. The WFO issue a statement, saying they trust the integrity of all their fighters like Kylo hadn’t essentially knocked someone into unconsciousness two months ago. MMA message boards seem to like the idea. TwoZeroTwo on the fightclubblog says ‘ _why else would a virtual no body get a fight like this. I bet you someone’s hella in debt_.’ Kimura_clutch responds, ‘ _how is this allowed anyway. Even if nothing is going on, it makes you look mad guilty_.’

You wonder how they would react to the real story, that you and he are an item. Would that be better or worse? The lifestyle magazines would probably like it. People Magazine calls for a touching reunion between the family members. US Weekly digs up every old photo of the Organa-Solo family they have the rights to reprint.

Mitaka leaves a voice message for you. He says, “Sir, I don’t want to overstep my boundaries, and I’ve looked the other way about this otherwise, but this has been going on long enough. We need you to come back and solve this problem.” Over the message, he clears his throat. “Is a dalliance really worth this kind of fall out?”

And at any other point, in your life you would have said probably not. You would have cut your losses and found another new slice of the planet to call your own. But now, the thought doesn’t even cross your mind.

You think back to a moment, a small one, deeply inconsequential in the grand scheme of your life. It was at the Marina Hotel the day before the Finn vs Kylo fight. You floated, sprawled out in the water with your head in Kylo’s lap. He stroked your hair. The whole room was enveloped in the echoey hush, like there was no one else in the whole world except for you two, like you were tucked away in your own dimension. 

And it was something very simple. A mention of a movie to come out next year and the way that he spoke about the future, your future with such simple confidence. You spend much of your life dealing with odds and probabilities, best guesses and worst-case scenarios. But in this moment, you realize that he saw you as an of course, an absolutely, a sure thing. That he lives in a world where sure things are real. 

You realized then that there were only three people you ever loved. 

Kylo reappears, damp with sweat from training but you barely notice him. He waves a hand in front of your face, “Earth to Hux. You there?”

You blink back to today, back to the phones ringing off the hook. Back to the teensy kitchen overlooking the roofs of rusted out warehouses. Back to Kylo, leaning his face in toward yours. “Absolutely.” You say, “I’m here.”

Pangolin12/17/2020  
  



End file.
